[Matthewmongan]

I use the new Uni-body Macbook for most of my needs. we also have a white plastic macbook, a dell xps1330, dell inspiron 1600 something, hp jornada 720 and a dell mini nine. on the desktop side, an amd system, a macpro and a mac mini. The inspiron blew a power regulator on the mobo after the wife dropped it, and now it can not be charged. however, before the spill it was a good machine. the mini 9 is solid, quiet and light, but it is small. i have used Hp's and acers with good results but the build quality on the acer was sub par. if you don't want a mac dell is hot right now.

the cost differential for macs only applies when you have apple upgrade the parts for you. they charge out the arse. other than that they are in keeping with other high end computers.

Before anyone flames me about going to newegg and making a macpro system themselves, find me a dual socket xeon mobo (with 4 pci express 16 slots) that doesn't suck. really, do it. last i looked there was one and it sucked. which is unfortunate.

that being said you are going to have to switch to vista unless you buy a netbook with xp home or have a copy of xp to install. we use vista at the office and it's not my favorite OS, but here's hoping for windows 7. you might be able to get xp through a business license but i have not tried.

a macbook with vmware fusion running both windows and OS X is a great machine, but dell makes a great laptop and the quality control has improved quite a bit. there was a huge difference in build quality between the inspiron of yore and the XPS 13. honestly the mini 9 is the strongest small form laptop i have used since the HP jornada.

if i were you, i would wait for the dual core atoms come out and hop on it. the mini 12 is also good but the battery life is poohful and the screen is not led.

make sure to reinstall the os and drivers to remove the bloat-ware they put on. also Clamwin is a great FREE antivirus program and Foxit reader is a great pdf reader that does not slow the system like adobe. I had a teacher that would send out these ridiculous pdf files that would choke up adobe like a hog. then i found foxit reader and it is so much faster. use firefox for web, thunderbird for mail, and sunbird for calender. you can try open office to save some change on MS office but if you need just word processing Abiword is good. i really haven't found a good alternative to itunes since winamp got crappy. this sucks because itunes is a memory hog.

make sure you head on over to newegg and max your ram. its easy and fun.