I now have a PC with Windows 98. Windows 2000 doesn't always have the hardware drivers, so I'm a bit wary of making the change till it's been run in a while. I use Cakewalk 9, rather than go to Cakewalk 10, they're going to change its name to Sonar according to the newsgroups .

Cakewalk

Cakewalk was the first sequencer I came across, when I had a sound blaster card, which I still have (I never get rid of anything), I bought a daughter board for it, which had a wave table, and it came with a free copy of Cakewalk Apprentice, which compared to a DOS sequencer was a revelation, there were one or two things the DOS sequencer could do that Cakewalk couldn't, although later versions added everything the Dos sequencer could do and far more.. 

I bought CakeWalk version 3 (www.cakewalk.com ) for £200, it would have been £300 if I had bought it from Turnkey, but I went round the corner to Dean St. and got it for £200. So that was the biggest ever software purchase I had made at that time. I've upgraded it from then on, and as it has grown more powerful, my computer has grown, I've been through 3 machines now, and recently upgraded again. It's why I don't drink or smoke or have a social life, all my money goes on my equipment.

Sound Forge

I also use Sound Forge , as it integrates well with Cakewalk, it appears under the tools menu. I can highlight a piece of audio, and just go Alt-T/F and just drop into Sound Forge, fiddle around with it there, close the file and Cakewalk re-imports it.  This is incredibly useful sometimes when I'm doing Alien voices or whatever that I can't do live in Cakewalk... I'll do all the treatment as lumps in Sound Forge, and bring it back into cakewalk, and then add a final effect.