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, this, this 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!