More good info, thanks, and good to hear specs from some PC users brave enough to buck the apple tide. I am stuck using a PC for scientific applications so going apple would be a hassle, though if Microsoft keeps being evil it may get to that some day. We have converted an old tower to be a linux box but it has a roaring cpu fan that makes it crazy for sound work.

The Snowball mike does sound good, anybody else using one?

The iMic is apparently ill-named, the item I was looking at is an audio interface that lets you plug mikes or components into a USB port instead of having to have audio-in ports on the computer, which would be helpful on a laptop.