What hardware will I need?

As you might imagine, game development requires some pretty decent hardware if you want to be productive. For a bare minimum spec machine we'd recommend a 1.0Ghz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, a DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3.0 class videocard with at least 128 MB of video memory, and at least 5 GB of free hard drive space. These days this is a very modest machine and you'd ideally want to do much better than this. As a general rule, if you can get your hands on a more powerful machine, you'll find life as a game developer much more satisfying and not quite as stressful.