On my 4-year-old Dell Latitude laptops, running Windows 7, I get low latency and stability. BUT!
* some audio interfaces come with crappy drivers that are impossible to get running based on the chipsets of your machine/other software installed/phase of the moon.
* EVERY Windows 7 box out there has a CRAPLOAD of scheduled tasks set to fire off between 10:00pm and 4:30am, and these tasks are mostly to fire up the network and send data to Microsoft. Network drivers can cause dropouts in audio. Networking should be entirely turned off (disabled at the interface level at least, if not disabled in BIOS) when recording. I just use a USB wireless adapter for my laptop and turn off all networking in BIOS. Remove the adapter and there's no networking.
Before I figured this out, I had a stable recording laptop that went unstable if I ever tried to record rehearsals and shows during nighttime/early-morning hours.
* EVEN if you have network adapters disabled, many of your programs will try phoning home to see if there are updates available, every time you use them, or as part of the scheduled tasks mentioned above. Want to turn off ALL of those phone-homes.
* You don't want realtime virus scanning while recording.
* You want a separate hard drive to store audio files, on a different controller than the system drive. And you don't want it to be a USB drive. That pretty much limits you to a machine with dual firewire ports on separate controller chips, running a hard drive and a Firewire interface. Or one of the laptops that allow you to insert a second hard drive. My Latitude E6510 does this.
Casual use of Windows for audio recording doesn't need all this, but once you start chasing low latency and high track counts these things are essential. It _can_ be done, and you _can_ end up with a system useful for both audio and non-audio tasks, but it's going to take some work.
Download a DPC latency checker to see whether your machine's setup is prone to audio dropouts. It's a good back-of-the-envelope check as to whether audio problems will arise.
It's too soon to know how Windows 8 will behave.
I use Reaper and Ableton Live 8 and Adobe Audition on these machines, and they all work nicely.
I have both Mac and PC,and use GB and Cubase, plus Audacity. I have a G5 tower and a Mac Intel 17" laptop, both use a firewire interface. USB 2.0 audio interface for the PC. All use ext. HD's, cased in USB and FW interfaces, and formatted for cross platform use. The Macs "just work". I prefer to work on them - they are,to me, a microwave oven - you turn them on, and and they work with no fuss. And "fuss" is money out of my pocket. The PC is "naked". I stripped it down to bare essentials, removed anti virus software, disabled all "phone home" apps, and disconnected it from the 'net. And I turned off BT, too. It runs only two apps, that's all. It's reliable that way, but windows whines when it can't get on the 'net. When I am done with a project, THEN I go on the net and check and update SW, but it is never used for web browsing or for email. If I have to DL something I am not sure of, I do it on the Mac, then move it over to the PC via a flash drive, so I can make sure there is no attached infection.
But there is no comparable free SW to GB, that is as easy to use. The fact is, the basic audio files, if all recorded at the same bit rate, etc., are the same, no matter what platform you use. I have Cubase on all my computers and import and move audio around, from many different origins, so, as long as you have good drivers and a stable computer, basic recording is the same on all platforms.
But, frankly, my 2006 late model 17" MB Pro, with an 800 FW ext drive and a FW400 interface, and running two ext monitors, is plenty for me. So, as advice, don't overbuy. The latest and greatest is not always the best..
:scowl: Ridiculous
