Mick,
As I've said, the 64 bit version of Vista, on a capable computer like the one from CyberPower would run your applications very well. From what I've seen with Windows 7, it's a great OS. Understand, 7 *is* Vista, tweaked, cleaned up, slimmed down and looking nicer, but the basics are Vista.

Many of the new motherboards are coming with Firewire ports as standard, but there's no way of knowing if you'll have the correct onboard chipset to run audio via Firewire.

You can run Windows XP on any of those computers I've listed, but you totally lose the 64 bit advantage. As to running a 64 bit CPU, with the exception of my laptop, all my CPUs for the past few years have been 64 bit, even though they've been running 32 bit OS (Win XP Pro) on them, so there's no worry there.

The Emu 2.1 driver will support XP 32, XP 64, Vista 32 and Vista 64 bit OS's, so you *could* go with Vista 64 bit and run your applications with no issues. I don't know if the Firepod has drivers for 64 bit OS, although I would think they would.

Gary


I'm blessed watching God do what He does best. I've had a few rough years, and I'm still not back to where I want to be, but I'm on the way and things are looking far better now than what they were!