What upgrades for 3d work and programming?

[Z064life]

I currently have a Dell something 8-something thousand PC, and it has an AMD Athlon 2600+, 1gb ddr ram, and a Geforce 7300.

Problem is, I do a lot of development work on my PC, and this ranges from web design in Dreamweaver, which isn't very demanding, to programming in Visual Studio 2008 and database design in Sql Server 2005 Dev/MySQL. Soon it will involve using Maya as I have access to video tutorials.

To run this software successfully, what upgrades should I get? I'd love to get a new PC like the new Mac Pro (mouth waters...), but one of my parents works, or rather, worked, in the IT industry (used to do programming/db design but now business analysis) so I have to go along with all the old views that I hear - your to blame, not the PC, and all that rubbish so I have to settle for 2nd best.

Also, I need IIS7 - unrestricted. Which versions of Vista has this? As I will get Vista, this will also effect the upgrade path.

My monitor is 19", is this big enough for 3d work? How demanding is 3d work on a PC? Getting a new CPU is probably out of the question as it will raise the cost so much that a new base station would be a better bet (in my dreams...). Likewise with a new monitor...

Thanks

[GHW]

As much RAM as the motherboard can support would be my first port of call if I were on a budget.

[Zad]

First step is to go along to crucial.com and upgrade your machine to at least 2GB. On slightly older machines, upgrading to 4GB (of which Windows will only see just over 3GB) causes the memory access to run slightly slower, so 2GB is a bit of a "sweet spot".

Beware of all the hype. The computer world is so full of marketing guff and "my cck is bigger than yours" that it can easily obscure the true issues. As a beginner to Maya (and you'll be a beginner for 2 years at least) a 19in monitor is more than adequate. When I worked in computer games (ok, over 5 years ago) 17in monitors were standard for the 2d and 3d artists. Many animations were rendered out on machines around the 1GHz mark. A huge monitor and fast video card (which won't help render speed anyway) might improve your productivity by 5% or so. Not much return for a big outlay.

In this sense, it is a bit like golf. You get some amateur golfer who bashes around and gets crap results, So he assumes it is his cheap clubs and spends big money on fancy graphite this and titanium that, when of course it is simply the golfer who doesn't yet have the ability. The golf shops and his fellow golfers aren't going to disabuse him of this.

You might be surprised how cheap a CPU upgrade is. I don't know what CPUs your system is capable of taking so can't advise on this. You may be able to double it's current speed for under £50. After a memory upgrade, the first thing I would look at would be a new hard drive. Newer hard drives have bigger caches and faster data transfer. After that, wait and see! Your system bottlenecks may not be the obvious ones, and hardware prices are continually falling.