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Recording Equipment - Traini Studios

I am not a sound engineer by training. But I have been using recording machines since I was a kid....my mother (a country western guitar player and singer) always had a reel-to-reel recorder in the house and I learned about using it from a young age. I bought my own reel-to-reel in high school and used it a lot. Today, the digital age rules. Not only is equipment cheap, the quality is outstanding for the price. My recording equipment (or "traini studios" as I like to call it) is detailed below. It currently occupies the corner of my bedroom.

• Tascam 8 Track Recorder: For about $200, this thing is great! You can only record two channels at one time (which is fine for me since I can't play more than one thing at a time). I typically record rhythm guitar and a drum machine at the same time and then just overtrack the other tracks. When I reach 8 tracks, I move some of the tracks to a PC via the USB interface and just lay down additional tracks. If I ever do this for a living, I'll buy the Tascam 24 track model. You can never have too many tracks. Hell, I think the 24 track is only $500; not bad for a 24 track.
• BOSS DR-5 Drum Machine: I bought this on Ebay for about $95. It's not too bad, but I will probably upgrade it in the future. I'm not smart enough to use the advanced features. I normally record a track of a constant drum pattern and then use pad mode to add breaks and other stuff. The Tascam lets me edit out portions of the pattern to break up the drums lines.
• Sampson Mike: Got this at Best Buy for about $45.  I'm sure there are better ones, but it works fine. One extra thing is a mike screen from Guitar Center for about $14, this greatly improves the vocals IMHO.
• Intel I5 Quad Core PC: I started mixing on an old 1.1Ghz AMD computer with old (circa 2002) slow hard drives. The CPU couldn't keep up and the end result of mixing was pretty grim. I finally had to break down and get a 3.4 Ghz machine with two 7200RPM SATA3 drives and high speed RAM. I'm running Windows 7 (64 bit) and try to make sure as few services are running as possible, so I don't slow it down. So far, it hasn't dropped anything on the floor, even when mixing up to 14 tracks..
• DAW Software: I started out using Audacity which I still like since it's real easy to understand and use. I also have Reaper and N-Track, and I'm trying to understand how to use them. The only thing I lack now is enough time to get good at this....I probably won't live long enough to really learn how to mix well.