>>It's worth it. There's a lot of good stuff in it.
>>
>>
>>>It's been a long time coming but that's great news.
>>>I'm thinking of getting a Win 8.1 machine and that will push me a bit.
>
>Thanks to all who replied. I wound up with a great deal on eBay ($720) taking your recommendations into account. Acer desktop with I7, 16 GB of memory, 2 GB hard drive, 24 GB SSD. You can get much bigger SSDs but I am going to use this as a development machine and it is plenty for that. Craig, I will go with your advice of using just MSE and Windows Defender. All my other apps will remain on the current machine so if the new one takes it in the shorts it won't be the end of the world.
>
>And I will get to see for myself what the big bad Windows 8 is all about....

sounds like correct way to drive ;-)
Al and myself often have voiced displeasure on Windoze mangling OS, installed programs and data, arguing for a more linux like approach. I am moving to VM's for all my environments, believing them to be the logical future based on the trend to growth more in core count than core speed - you might check if a Virtualbox VM is speedy enough on your fast machine. As you have the setup task to do IAC, now is the time to do so making your environment fit for the next half dozen years.

Have fun

thomas