well to be honest i am not sure i was thinking of a mac but there are things that you cant do on them that you can on a pc am i right? plus i am getting a special deal on the pc so it seems like a better option as of now.

Aha. We now know the secret of your Mac hatred. You bought a crap machine. Fair enough, but I don't think it's the OS, I think you have some fried chips in your laptop.

I've never run Vista and I work for the WA State government. That's right, even they haven't invested in the headaches of such a conversion. XP is fine for what it does. Microsoft just made Vista to have something new to sell.

The things you can't do: 1) Run Internet Explorer since Microsoft stopped making it for Macs. This hardly matters since Firefox is a superior browser (I don't like Safari myself, but lots of people do, haven't tried Chrome which doesn't have a Mac version yet, but will) 2) Play a lot of PC only games (I've know a total Mac Geek to get a Windows laptop purely to play games on). However, if you get a Mac with boot camp, you can of course run both. I'm not a PC gamer and have never cared.

Things you can do on a Mac you can't on a PC: the only significant one I know is run Garage Band which is a great little lo-end recording program. I like Audacity too, which is available on both, but it's way buggier. You can't run the other iLife stuff on a PC either, but it's not particularly special. iMovie is o.k. for really short videos, I suppose.

Performance wise, I still believe Macs are better for audio, video, and photography/graphics, as recently proven by the fact that the Microsoft "I am a PC" commercials were outed as being made on a Mac. Also, Macs are still way more secure. I've never known a Mac user to get a virus or spyware, and I've known several PC users who did (as well as several who's security software made their computer run slow!)

That said, the differences get smaller every day, and if you get a good enough deal on your PC, why wouldn't you go for it. Unless it's a Dell, and then run away as fast as you can...

does such a thing actually EXIST?:eek:

Yes

It's in my music studio

I'd vote for linux personally, but I also wouldn't be there to help you get used to it, and it is a different world

i saw pictures or yr music place. It looks fookin' wicked. Do you just record yr own stuff or produce other people / bands?

I just tried setting up a MythTV box but there was apparently a bug in the distro which only required some recoding and recompiling to fix. Yeah, I'm going to be able to figure it out. (bug was for my particular hardware--not the whole program)

The guy supporting the distro didn't seem to have time or inclination to help a newbie.

I'm back to windows.

there are also
8x2.66ghz
with the following techs

I'm using Vista for a year now (at core duo and 1gb ram), and it's good, nice lookin'.
I'm rather not playing games, so ram-eating don't bothers me.

i don't hate macs per se-- i hate the HYPE that covers up the fact that macs are very far from perfect. mac acolytes would have you believe that mac is their savior from outer space, and it isn't. this probably has to do with a) good marketing, b) the psychology of having spent a ton of money in a product "marries" you to it.

so i think the secret of my mac realism is that i didn't pay a cent for it-- therefore i am not blinded by my financial "commitment". i am able to look at it past the hype. it doesn't hurt my self-image to say "oh, this here sucks".

and macs do have problems. tons of them.
http://www.macfixit.com/

if all those problems were attributable to bad chips, then bad chips would be quite the plague. but no-- it's simpler than that-- it's just that steve jobs is not baby jesus, and can't do magic.

again with more detail, mac tax

Today all OSs including linux really all do the same thing--heck Mac is unix for crying out loud

Its a matter of personal preference over GUI and if you prefer the Mac you get to pay the

mac tax

yes.
is it possible to buy it with xp installed or without a windows installation?
that depends on the oem.
maybe, depending on the machine.

what laptop are you getting?

it uses about 600 MB RAM, my laptop came with 1 GB and things run slower than I think they should, so i'll add some more RAM soon, but VISTA and 2007 apps suck from this users viewpoint they just move all the commands into different places for no obvious reason other than to move commands into other places and say its new. as someone who uses office 2003/XP all day at work and then has to deal with the slow confused mess of office 2007/vista on my personal laptop, its really a downgrade.

vista sucks. if I'd known it was so bad I would have saved for an apple.

in which regard?

Yes, and trust me, I am far from a Jobs worshiper. However, I still think the problems you point to from personal experience are not typical to most Macs I've seen people running. It sounds like you have a machine with some internal problems that are not attributable to the OS.

Mac laptops are prettier than the competition, but I don't personally think they are worth the difference in price. However, all Apples are not expensive, contrary to myth. The mini is a completely serviceable computer, and it's dirt cheap. Just don't buy an Apple monitor for it, and it's a very cheap date.

Mr Boy - you're not a spacker - you can run Vista very similarly to XP as it is. Get a Vista PC, fiddle about, and you've got the PC you want. Send I & I a PM if you're after more details.

This board just gets a little more Rasta friendly every day I am here.

I don't like the look or the workings of Vista. XP is fine; I have no intention of changing.