See your speaking the lingo already. You'll be a total geek in no time
Consider what your dialup costs are including phone calls and think about broadband. If its just a CDROM drive I'd opt out of that and make sure you got a burner. If your going to run programs like Photoshop on it get at least 512 MB ram.
I'l let more experienced hands expound the benefit/negatives of the "working"stuff.