Recording with Vista?

I haven't been really happy with my Mac, but that's probably because I had unreasonable expectations of it. Macs do the sort of stuff you're talking about really well, but the don't do other stuff I need, like running financial software; Quickbooks' version for Mac is about a decade behind the times, and even the Finale version for Mac is awful. Hence I find I need a PC to do some things, and I use the Mac for what it does well. But should we really need two computers to do what we need to do in the world?

vista eats up all of your ram just to make it look nice.
just go with xp.