Data Logging - Weather Stations

Hi, I'm new to this site so this may be a topic already covered. I'm a student looking at how weather stations and data logging devices are set up. I'm trying to do a comparison with what the college has set up and with what is either the so called `standard` outside of the college or with what is the ideal set up.
At the moment the college uses standard pc's whatever is free basically and uses two different weather stations from Oregon Scientific, WMR200 and a WMR100N. The pc has multiple weather station data logging softwares installed, Weather OS, LS2Win 1.0 and Virtual Weather Station on a Windows XP platform.
My question is what would be the ideal set up if finance was not a problem, but bearing in mind this is for personal/ study use and not a National Meteorological station and what would be the most common set up that people find useful.
Any information on pc specs, software, weather stations, file types, software platforms would be helpful also has anyone tried a Unix base rather than Windows etc.
I realise this may be a bit long winded but any feed back would be greatly appreciated and very beneficial to me