RAM is not that expensive anymore so you may want to consider doubling. You also want to make sure you have plenty of hard drive space to store all that digital information. If you are doing a lot of work in this area consider something along the lines of at least a 20GIG hard drive. A 40 gig hard drive would be preferred for video editing so that you have plenty of storage space depending on how much video you want to store. On the PC side we have many more choices to make depending on what you need the machine to be able to do.
Software is by nature always going to run slightly behind hardware.
The problem with computers now is that the speed of a computer isn t just based on the processor speed. To make matters even more confusing, instead of just having to pick from the Intel Pentium line of chips, you have AMD as well as some other companies producing a whole range of chips that can power your computer. I could spend two or three articles just looking over what chip is best for each application. For most of us a good choice would still be Pentium III or AMD Athlon would be good choices. Hard drive space above 20GIG when you aren t doing anything more than basic computer tasks is a waste of money, but hard drives aren t all that expensive anymore either.