Assuming you're using photoshop, you really need ram. A lot of it: at least 4GB of DDR3; I'd make sure you get 2GB sticks, so you can expand it if you need more kick. This won't be cheap and you'll have to hunt for it in prebuilt systems. It's well worth looking pretty carefully at the motherboard as well; they make a huge difference to internal data speeds (especially memory latency). For what you need, I'd get a GPU with plenty of onboard ram (again, look for DDR3 ram), but you don't need the fastest around. For Photoshop, there's little benefit in going to 64bit at this stage.
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