I need a new computer for the machine that we use for correcting the USDA NAIP imagery and repackaging it.   We've got a 3.2ghz Dell that has never been right since Dell replaced the motherboard.   I can't afford to mess with it any longer.

To process these image files, we have to read a 200mb Mr SID image and convert it to .bmp images that are sometime 5 gigabytes, replace all of the "near black" pixels with black, and recompress them into jpeg 2000 format.   We are reprocessing every county for the 20 states most requested by our customers.

We also reproject any county that is split by a UTM zone so the imagery can be displayed for either UTM setting.

I need a plain box:

• High horsepower, for the compression routines.    I know nothing about the dual/quad core processors or their advantages.   I doubt whether the GDAL open source imagery processing software we are using can take advantage of multi-threading, but we often have the machine doing two different tasks at the same time (burning DVDs or zipping/unzipping imagery that has already been processed).
• I suppose 2gb of RAM is enough.
• A strong powersupply.
• I think we have the imagery on a 300gb drive, and it is maxed out.   Really need around 500gb.  
• I like the RAID discussions I hear.  I totally don't know what that is, but I want it.   While none of this imagery is replaceable, the shear size of the datastore prevents us from having a good backup of it.   However, I do now have a 750gb firewire drive attached to it that I can use for a removable backup.    I just takes about 24 hours to copy it all.   And, I do think disk speed is important for this application.
• 2 or more firewire ports to communicate with external disk drives and our Rimage disk duplicator.
• Windows XP SP2.
• F-Secure Anti-Virus, or nothing and I can install it.   I do NOT want to have to clean up after any other virus installation and removal.
• I will want MS Office 2003, etc, on it, but I have an MSDN license for them so unless they are bundled affordably with some component, forget them.

• Video is insignificant.

I'm not sure what else I should be asking for. 

Everyone on my team as so many irons in the fire, I don't want to build this up internally.   I want a low hassle deal with someone that likes to do this kind of thing, can ask me a few more key questions, and deliver a box to me a couple of weeks later that I plug-in, throw on my software, and start crunching.

Anyone interested?      If so, my email address is tmacy, and I'm on the mapshots.com domain.

Thanks!