^ I totally disagree with that one. Vista Home Premimum is not a piece of crap. It's almost the same as Ultimate, it just doesn't have remote access. And Ultimate is slightly better at backing up data. Home Premium is fine and is used by many people.
There is not a lot of difference in terms of performance b/w 2 gigs n 4 gigs of ram. So go with 2gigs n use the money to get hd4850 which wil give a lot of performance boost.
He should stick with the 4gb of ram if he decides to go with Vista 64 bit. It uses more resources and chews up memory. So 4gb of ram is fine. And he said he would be playing older and lower end games. He probably won't be playing Crysis so a 4850 won't be necessary. The 4670 is a good card and will handle games just like a 9600gt/9600GSO.
That makes absolutely no sense. There is almost no difference between Ultimate and Home Premium. I have systems running both and there is no reason to spend extra for ultimate unless you have to have one of the few features it has the Home Premium doesn't.
I recommend going with home premium 64bit like gt7sanremo posted.