man..... i dont have that Rar thing-a-ma-jigy! my pareents are on the brink of saying flat out NO about me getting the programs to mod.... (truespace 3.2, modelview32, WinCOB2FS, and VPview... is that all i need... is it?? 
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You need Lithunwrap for UV mapping cuz trueSpace 3.2 is lousy for texturing. A trick to do with trueSpace to make UV mapping easier is to paint the sections of your model with different, solid colors. That gives each part a different material, which can be selected in the unwrapper. Makes it much easier to tell which faces fit together.
Even a crotty old 486DX can be used for making models with trueSpace. Heck, even a 486SX will work, especially if you're sticking to low-poly stuff for Retail FS2. I did a bunch of stuff with a 486SX/33 with a whopping 8megs RAM in 30pin SIMMs, in Windows 95a on an 8gig hard drive.
These days many computer shops are literally throwing away Pentium III and Slot A systems! See if your folks will let you call around to computer shops and ask if they've any older PCs they need to dispose of and if they might dispose of one your way.
That's how I got a lot of my PC parts when I was your age! Course in those days it was stuff with 8088, 80286 and 80386 (if I was lucky) CPUs. Anything under a gigahertz these days, most people turn their noses up at, heck, it's getting to where they're going "Welll, I dunno, it's *only* 2 gigahertz...". I used a PCjr and was darn happy to have it!
