If you try and get a copy of Fruity Loops, it is a reasonably good program for creating drum loops, you have complete control over the BPM, a massive selection of drum samples and the ability to export the loops as single bar or multiple bar patterns in the time sig of your choice in *.wav or *.mp3

Incidentally, for beats, compressing the fuck out of kick drums with a slightly open attack gives you uberpunch on them and to get the right release, divide 60,000 by the tempo in BPM, say 120 per minute, and then keep dividing the number you get by two until it is between 50 and 100...

For snare and toms, you can change the sound by gating and adding reverb until you find what you're looking for... Sometimes a little compression works wonders on toms and snares as well...

Low Pass roll offs can give Hats more sizzle and clarity as well...

Even though a lot of people are going over to pure digital set ups, I honestly think that if you've got some cash, spend 100 dollars on a Behringer Compressor and about the same on an EQ unit, because there is no doubt about it, mixes with analogue elements do seem to sound warmer and more pleasing in the end...

I was working in a studio last year with a MAC G5 running PRO Tools, meant to be the fastest audio computer ever built, and yet by the time it had loaded in your Pro Tools mix, the style of music you were working on was no longer in vogue. Also, it crashed constantly... In my own studio I have a PC running Cubase 5.0 and Cool Edit Pro With MAudio Delta 10 10's uplinking from a 24 track Spirit Studio into an AMD Athlon 2000XP PC with 500 Meg DDR, none of this stuff is particularly expensive now, and it does the job great... PC's are much easier to upgrade and repair than MAC's...