No 1 Flat screens are a luxury that is only to seen as needed if you really are short of space.
No 2. Something like an Athlon 750 with 128 meg as a minimum should be your target.
Hard drive- not an issue but 20-30 gigs is normal.
No 3. get a multi monitor system- 2 to 4 monitors 17".
The easy route is W93 SE, the hard route is W2000.
dont even think of ME.
W2000 only supports multi monitor by using Vodoo3 2500 video cards which are hard to get hold of...BUT for RT charts etc, W2000 does give a more stable platform.
I used to have W98, but had crashes quite often. Only way to recover was to re-boot.W2000 is rock solid, only a very occaisional crash. Because of the structure of W2000, a crashed application can be terminated is isolation and restarted.
I use an Athlon 800 overclocked to 896, 256M ram, 20G hdd and 3 17" monitors.I am comfortable with this for daytrading (others use much more!).If you are only trading occaisionally, using EOD charts etc, then a single monitor system, 64M, 500Mhz cpu would be more than adequate.
Hope this helps.