Is there a Perfect Hardware Combination?

[StuartR]

Awesome replies!!!

It will take a long time for me to apply these suggestions, but as a famous U.S. general once said:   I shall return :-)

Thank you for all the suggestions!!!

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Dennis - the short answer is that if you're willing to purchase a MAC things should work fine with little effort as they are built to handle realtime audio and video. Windows systems can do this just as well in most cases but it requires some tuning (changing OS settings) to get there. It's possible the existing machine you have will work. 
Let us know how it goes.