HyperXK05

So its been a few years since I have played SimCity 4, but i wanna get back into it. I had a buddy build a decent PC with a fresh Copy of XP and it will ONLY be used to play SC4 and download content for it. So with that said, where do i begin? What items are a def "must have" and anything else would anyone suggest? the last time I played, I went a bit crazy with downloading buildings, the NAM and a bunch of other stuff so dint get all the dependencies i needed and i had brown boxes and game would close to desk top often. so i want to do it the right way and get everything I need. I'll be installing the game over night and hopefully get to start playing tomorrow.