Firstly, what software do each of you consider absolute must-haves when it comes to fractals and fractal art (include favourite renderer's and why, do some serve well in some ways while other do better in other ways? etc) and what other non-fractals proggies do you use for editing, etc... Both images and videos. (ex. I have Photoshop CS5) .. And monitoring utility programs?
My must have Fractal Generators are Mandelbulb 3D, Chaoscope, ChaosPro, Mutatorkammer, and Xenodream.
M3D and Chaoscope have my favorite rendering abilities, ChaosPro is great for Mandelbrot play (though UltraFractal can do deeper zooms, I just never liked UF - something about using it just never clicked with me and it's a chore and a bother to learn when I have other tools that I enjoy playing with!), Mutatorkammer is fantastic for all sorts of things that no other program does as well like easily making seamless fractal textures, and it's the best choice for "exotic image projection" if you like distorting and otherwise playing with mixing fractals and photographs, and Xenodream is wonderful because it exports 3D obj files easily (ChaosPro also exports obj files easily) for use in my 3D Software (I use Carrara, Bryce, Daz 3D Studio, and Blender).
Other software - besides the 3D Software above, I use VirtualDub for compiling image sequences, Pinnacle Studio for video editing, Arcsoft Photo Studio for image editing on PC (Pixelmator on the mac), and a slew of others for making my own music for the videos (Audacity is the big player on that list), and doing odd effects (Particle Illusion is one of my Secret Weapons for getting unusual results that make people ask how it was done).
I don't bother with any system monitoring utilities - I never got any spectacular results from them.
The second part is, what do each of you recommend as an optimum hardware configuration? I have a Core2 Duo E7500 2.93GHz cpu, and two gigs of ram. Any of you use graphics cards? I'd imagine they help immensely(?)... Any other hardware or OS tweaks that'll optimise the fractals/fractal art experience?
I just use the best I can afford. Not usually very good computers.
Only a few programs use the GPU, and I do a lot of work on a computer with no graphics card.
The key thing to shop for is processors - LOTS of GHz and as many cores as possible.
Even RAM takes a backseat to that.
And a nice monitor makes everything more enjoyable when it comes to Fractals or any form of Computer Art.
Hope that helps.