Thanks for all the advice so far. My current machine and Inta Audio about 4 years old has intel core 2 duo 6320 1.86Ghz 1.86ghz, 2 hard drives, 4gb of ram of which 2.94 is usuable. If I use more than one track of halion SE, sonic or sonic SE it just dies - keeps crashing etc. It seems to struggle particularly with the Grand SE and HSO. I am a reasonably accomplished pianist so play lots of notes and I would like to use up to about 20 tracks of sample based vst instruments - each using lots of harmony.
So any tips on what sort of minimum spec might work for me whether mac or pc would be gratefully appreciated.
(My workaround for now seems to be to export the VST instrument tracks, copy the song file, remove the vst instruments and insert the samples as audio tracks).
Incidentally if lots of pros are using macs - is that Cubase or just logic?