CompuServe Thread

Hi Everyone, I am looking to buy a machine to be my primary "workhorse" at home. I currently am using a Gateway 486/25 at home, and have access to several pentium 90's w/32megs+ at work. I would love to hear everyones suggestions for this machine. I would like to keep the following in mind while making this decision: 1. Would need to be under $6000 complete. 2. Would run most everything,including 3ds4, acad13, photoshop, and other day-to-day programs. 3. I would like to move to Win-NT as soon as possible, probably with a dual boot until 3ds is released as an NT product. 4. I would like it to be a multimedia machine, with expandability and a large monitor (17" or 21"??), cdrom, and sound. Specific questions include: 1. Dual-Pentium or not? 2. How much ram to start with, 32 or 64 or somewhere between? 3. Monitor size? 4. Recommended HD size? 5. SCSI or IDE? 6. Recommended Pentium speed? 7. Back up options?(I use a Colorado TBU 250 on my other machine..slow,small) I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and I do have my own general opinions about what to go with, but I would really like some opinions from the experience in this forum, and also with the new version of 3dsNT coming out, I would like to be prepared. I am unfortunately unable to wait for long before making this purchase, otherwise I would probably wait until summer to decide. Thanks so much for all advice offered. Doug