What Should I Choose, MAC VS. PC Options

[sampoo]

Hi All,
I'm not posting because i wan't to start a mac vs. pc discussion but i just can use some good advise. At the moment i use a PC in my studio wut i need to upgrade soon.
My PC isn't stable and i'm a bit tyred of al the bleu sceerns, lost work and reinstalling windows, ... so i'm thinking of buying a MAC. There are a couple of things i would like to know and i hope someoone can help me out.
1. I'm used to cubase and i would like to keep using this but will cubase run smooth on a MAC (sice i heard it was written and optimized for the PC)
2. I use Wavelab and Soundforge on my PC now but both programs aren't available for the mac.
Witch (good) audio recording/editting software is there for the MAC
3. I called some local music shops who tells me that nowadays pc's running windows xp are just as stable as the MAC. Any people here who use both or are recently switched from pc to mac?

Thanks in advance
alex

[dixiechicken]

Hi Sampoo!

My background - I'm a sysadmin for a dept at our university -mixed environment with som
250 computers 2/3 are pc:s 1/3 are macs & handful of unixes/linux boxes.

I'm using Windows XP and RedHat Linux 9.0 on my Fujitsu notebook.
Mac OS X 10.2.6 on my iMac flatpanel.
On my Grey G4 AGP 400MHz Mac I run Yellowdoglinux 3.0, Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS X 10.2.6.

1)
Not true, today at least, I know several people that uses Cubase on the Mac and swear by it.

2)
Spark XL by TC-Works, Peak by Bias - are just two.

3)
Nope, it is not that simple. Stability depends on lot of factors on any platform.
My experience of XP is - the sytem is fairly stable but the apps crashes a lot
and its quite slow. My Fujitsu a P4 1.8 GHz is struggling a lot.

PC:s with windows NT/2000/XP are very hardware sensitive and can be very tricky to get stable.
( scsi - cards are notoriuos in this respect )

I can grade stability for you based on my own experience, from stablest to most unstable.
( in this little list I presume the systems to be correctly setup )

Linux, Mac OS X, windows 2000, Mac OS 9, dos 6.22, Windows XP, Windows 95, Windows ME,
Windows 98.
In this list Linux & Mac OS X is way ahead of the rest of the pack, simply no comparison.
Win98 is the worst piece of shit I have ever used.

Cheers: Dixiechicken

[Synthetic]

I have heard Cubase SX on OSX is supposed to be really great.

Personally, I have used PC's and my biggest complaint is third party additions such as devices and such and the fact that because it is so popular... its the most widely exploited system and almost always has security holes. Then there is one virus on macs for every 10 written for PC's.

With that said... I think both can be great machines... it just lies in your preferences really