Re: beginer
Presonus Gear is pretty good a lot of people in the forum use presonus gear with pretty good succes. and yes a decent computer will be a good thing depending on you own personal needs you may need more than 2 gig of ram and possibly quad core processor.
You need to consider whether you want to record drums, if so you will need more inputs...probably a minimum of 4 [kick drum, snare durm and 2 overhead microphones for tom and cymbals.
That a fairly minimal setup for drus, a lot of modern msuic uses upwards of 8 mics on the drums.
Brandon has actually created a "soundcard wizard" to help everyone out when looking for a interface that meet there own personal needs. check it out by clicking the following link.
This is a great forum with a lot of really friendly and experienced home studio owners that should be able to point you in the right direction but you wil have to put in the effort also
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MY GEAR 
1x Presonus Firestudio
3x Shure SM57
1x Shure BETA 52a
2x Legacy AXIS1 Small Diaphragm Condensors [To be upgraded to Rode M3 microphones soon]
Thats all for now... BUt i do have Pretty bad GAS at the moment |