I've got an old pc - 2001 vintage - that I got from someone about a year ago real cheap, and upgraded - basically new western digital 120 gb hard-drive and windows home xp. I've been using it primarily for midi sequencing - an old version of cakewalk pro audio with an Akai s5000 sampler.
The pc has what I believe to be a shuttle ak12ac motherboard with via kt133 chipset, 1.2 ghz AMD Athlon CPU, 640 mb of ram, and a builtin soundcard.
I've also got a Roland vs1680 digital recorder, and became aware of Reaper through the efforts of randygo at being to to bring proprietary formatted files from the recorder into Reaper:
http://www.cockos.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3613
I suspect that I will primarily track in the vs1680, and mix and master in Reaper. However, I would like to also get an maudio 2496 to allow me flexibility in going directly into Reaper, if I so desire. I will also use the midi in/outs of the 2496 with Cakewalk and the Akai. My goal is to completely bypass the internal sound card - it's crap for sure. Best I can tell, installation of another card will cause it to be "turned off" by the bios, I believe.
Are there any performance issues with the pc in general - it seems its on the bottom end of recommended - or with the pc/2496 combination. I'm sure a ram upgrade would help.
I can't afford to build a new pc just right now - but that's my eventual goal. Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated. Thanks ...