I have a pentium 4, 3gig laptop with 512 ram. I use it for all my music production, and it leathers the pants off my desktop any day of the week. Personally i would stay away from macs, but thats my personal preferance. If you look after your system, then stabilty will not be a problem. The age old myth that macs are more stable is unfounded from my own personal use. Plus macs are far too expensive compared to thier pc laptop counterparts which are cheaper to upgrade, have more software available, and actually run faster...