We have recently upgraded our PC's . Here is alist of the hardware.

PC 1: Dell XPS T600 fitted with two ATA66 10gig drives, 256megs of ram, Midiman audiophile 2496 sound card, DVD player, 100 meg zip drive, SCSI card with external CD burner, 32meg TNT graphics card, Roland PC160 midi keyboard and a Roland JV1010 sound module.

PC 2: Custom made. P III 800 Mhz CPU, two ATA66 10gig drives, 256 megs of ram, 8 meg creative graphics card, 100 meg zip drive, CDR drive, Creative sound blaster live value.

Both PC's have been built to make music but within a budget. We tried all types of music making software to find which is the best for us. And this is the result.

If we are editing any audio we us Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge or Steinbergs Wavelab. Both are superb Audio editors with there own advantages.

If we are composing music we use Sonic Foundry's Acid if were using just loops, or we use Cakewalk's Pro Audio 9 which lets us use external midi sound modules and audio files. As for Cakewalk it has to be one of most stable software packages i have ever used for making music.

I have just tried demo of there new package called Sonar and it combines both Acids loop stretching and compressing technology and the powerful midi and audio editing from Cakewalk Pro audio 9.

We have started to use Propellerheads Reason and we both think its the mutts nuts, the sounds you can create are stunning, i would have to say you don't need to buy another external sound source ever again!!!.