I will give a few of my own opinions here as most of the feedback seems to pretty positive.
As has been said already, with a bit of optimization Win 7 will work fine for audio/MIDI needs. I can’t speak for Win 8 as I’ve never used it.
I have been using Windows for audio/MIDI since about 1998. Early Win OS were pretty basic. Windows XP was pretty good for the most part (probably the most stable I can remember). Vista I never used because I heard so many bad things.
I have built a few PCs in that time. I built a real nice one bout 2 years around an Intel i7 2600k CPU. I had it running Win 7, which up until that point I had never used before. I sold it all just a few months ago. There’s just a couple of things about Win 7 that really irritated me. If you check any Windows forum you’ll find most of these problems are common enough
In the Windows 7 Explorer you can’t check the size of a folder by looking at the size column. ??? Even though the column is there, nothing is listed. You have to hover with the mouse or right-click for properties. This means you can’t organize folders by size when you’re looking see what’s taking up HD space or just quickly tidy up files.
Folder types. If you put a bunch of audio files in a folder, it will auto make it an “media” folder which has annoying column headers different from regular folders. You will need to access folder properties to revert to normal folder
Copying or moving files and folders. I don’t know what’s going on here but sometimes it takes a stupidly long time to copy or move folders containing sub folders to another location on the HD. The copy/move progress indicator frequently shows that it will take hours to copy or move folders of even just a few gigs in size. I often had to crash the explorer, copy/move the files to an external drive and then move them to the new location on the HD.
If you plan on moving files between the two OS, you will need a drive formatted to FAT32 which I thinks has some kind of limit on the size of the individual files (4 Gigs or something like that)
As mentioned the updates are pretty ridiculous. There will be a ton of them there if you leave it a few weeks and then half of them will fail when you try to install. On one occasion a set of failed updates caused all my external ports to stop functioning and I had to boot from the Win DVD and repair the drivers.
Also, it wouldn’t wake all ports/devices after waking from Sleep. Bluetooth mouse and keyboard and often USB devices wouldn’t function until I fully shut down and restarted the system. Basically rendering the sleep mode totally redundant and pointless
You will need to revert to the Legacy Firewire Drivers if you are using any external Firwire stuff. I’m fairly sure you’ll have to do this every time you install new updates
Also Win 7 doesn’t have a killer app like the Audio MIDI Setup on OSX. You will need to find one yourself
You can’t delete Internet Explorer to stop it from opening system based web links. It’s kind of hard-wired into the OS. You can disable parts of it, but then if you click on a system based link, you can not view it.
Then there’s always BSOD. Can happen anytime, even when the CPU is not under any stress.
These are just a few of the things that irritated me.
I picked a MacBook Pro and using OSX since 2008 (which still works perfectly) and I have never once encountered any of these irritations. I bought a second hand Mac Pro 4,1 with the cash I made from selling my Win 7 PC. Needless to say it is absolutely rock solid.
Funnily enough, I did used to run Win XP through Boot Camp on the MacBook Pro and that worked really well.