Tuning Postgres for Single connection use

Any rules of thumb for work_mem, maintenance_work_mem, shared_buffer, etc.
for a database that DOESN'T anticipate concurrent connections and that is
doing lots of aggregate functions on large tables? All the advice I can
find online on tuning
(this<http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Performance_Optimization>
, this<http://media.revsys.com/talks/djangocon/2011/secrets-of-postgresql-performance.pdf>
, this <http://www.revsys.com/writings/postgresql-performance.html> etc.)
is written for people anticipating lots of concurrent connections.

I'm a social scientist looking to use Postgres not as a database to be
shared by multiple users, but rather as my own tool for manipulating a
massive data set (I have 5 billion transaction records (600gb in csv) and
want to pull out unique user pairs, estimate aggregates for individual
users, etc.). This also means almost no writing, except to creation of new
tables based on selections from the main table.

I'm on a Windows 8 VM with 16gb ram, SCSI VMware HD, and 3 cores if that's
important.

Thanks!