Hello!

My laptop crashed. :p The good news is that I can go laptop shopping, and I'd like some advice. Mac or PC?

I think I'm a regular computer user; not IT illiterate, even if I'm not exactly IT savvy. I use my laptop mainly for music, movies, television shows, torrenting, internet, and word processing... word, excel and power point... and some audio editing. I don't play computer games.

I've been a long time PC user, so I'm familiar with the problems of PC, but I'm also very familiar with the operating system. My last OS was XP, if I get a new PC the OS would either be Windows 7 or Vista; I hope it won't be Vista cos I've heard bad things about it. Was originally using XP.

Never used a Mac before; I've heard good things about it, but I'd also like to know more about its problems to make an informed decision.

Mac users... PC users who converted to Mac... Mac users who converted to PC.. any help? Advice?

I'm a PC user who converted to Mac. I had to for my career. I've had a Macbook Pro for three years now, and not a single hardware problem, or a virus, or anything to speak of that qualifies as a reason not to get one. This post feels really unhelpful LOL, but I just haven't had a single problem to speak of, and I found the Mac's OS pretty easy to get used to.

I had XP for three years before this Mac, and I probably wiped the hard drive every six months due to all kinds of silly issues.

Best of luck! I love computer shopping.
JD

I'm a long-time Mac user who also happens to know PC's pretty well, having put together and configured dozens of them from scratch in the past. I've had lots of PC's and not one of them was ever a brand name but rather systems put together from scratch, including the installation and configuration of the OS, so I'm a pretty decent authority on both OS'es.

Macs have one big advantage over PC's that has made me switch all the computers in my house to Macs, including my Windows server hosting Exchange to Leopard server. That advantage is that the tools Apple provides for free for the purposes you use your computer for simply work and work well.

For instance, just in the last couple of weeks, I put together a DVD for my kids' dance studio for the annual Nutcracker production they do. With boatloads of video footage and thousands of photos, I used the tools Apple provides for free to make a professional-looking DVD. I used iMovie '09 to put together the footage I needed into a package, complete with chapter markers. I then exported the video to iDVD, selecting a nice theme that matched up perfectly with Nutcracker. iMovie also analyzed my video and removed the worst of video shake due to my lack of a useful tripod when taking the videos.

I then used Garageband to take some Tchaikovski music and edited it to create the music in the DVD menus, taking a little bit of Waltz of the Snowflakes for the top menu and Waltz of the Flowers for the scene selection menus.

I then used photos from Aperture (ok, that one's paid, but you could easily use the free iPhoto for this) and placed some of my best photos into the DVD menus. iDVD automatically created motion thumbnails for each chapter after importing from iMovie. After setting up the music, the photos, and doing some slight re-arranging, I burned the DVD to disk, which took about two hours to render and burn.

It came out beautifully and people at the dance studio have trouble believing it wasn't professionally done.

For those people out there who've used both Windows and Mac OS, raise your hand if you think Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player are as easy to use or as good as the stuff Apple provides. Yeah, didn't think I'd see too many hands.

BTW, you won't be able to find Windows 7 until late this year, or perhaps early next year since it's only just come out in a public beta form and Microsoft has not yet announced a release date. Before Windows 7 appears, Apple will have released Snow Leopard, an OS designed for multi-core and 64-bit performance rather than for features. I think some manufacturers are still providing Windows XP but by and large you will find Vista, a dog of an OS that even I uninstalled in disgust despite being a power user who loves to have the latest and sometimes-not-so-greatest. I do have Windows 7 running in a virtual machine on my main Mac desktop using a product called Parallels Desktop, which allows you to run a full-blown Windows setup on your Mac at very good speeds. For top Windows performance, Apple provides Boot Camp for free, allowing users to boot into Windows only.

A year ago, PC Magazine ran tests on what the fastest Windows machine was among laptops. The winner was... the MacBook Pro! Macs, which aren't optimized for Windows, can run Windows as well or better than the top PC's.

Security is also awesome. There are no known viruses on a Mac as of yet while only one or two known trojans exist in the wild. Trojans essentially trick you into installing a bad program by asking you to type in your admin password since they cannot crack the Unix security. Windows 7 is still built on the ancient Windows XP architecture and is just as vulnerable to viruses as its predecessors.

You said you're not IT illiterate, but hopefully I didn't give too techy an answer. I'm a software engineer so I have a habit of doing that sometimes.

I'd just like to second what Roger said, who said it in a much better way than I could have. I also run both Mac and XP at home, and I love my mac. It's a lot easier to use, and less headaches. I'm on my third Mac laptop right now. The first one had a known logic board issue, which happened three times. The third time I took it to the Apple Store to get them to fix it (and once I spoke to someone who would actually listen to what I'd done), they gave me a new laptop as a replacement, free of charge. Now that's service!

I work with a lot of people that are scared to troubleshoot macs. However, some of them have gotten their hands on a Mac to play with, and they confessed that the mac was a lot easier than a windows machine to figure out!

Another vote here for Mac, but get one that can run Parallels (e.g with the Intel processor) so that if you want to you can run Windows. Buy XP if you can, of course.

The reason I recommend this is that there are a lot of obscure bits of add-on hardware, and at least one major area area of software, that aren't very well supported by macs. For example, there is only one USB digital TV receiver for Macs and it's pretty expensive, there are at least a dozen for PCs. Most USB microscope cameras and web cameras, and many scanners, are not supported by Macs. And there is now no route planning / satnav software that runs under OS-X other than a program for yachting - Google Maps will allegedly eventually add GPS support in all versions some time, but it hasn't happened yet and you need a network connection to use it anyway. All of those should be soluble by running Windows under Parallels.

Thanks for your advice!

In the end, I went with a PC. It came down to $$$; for the same specs, I'd be paying $500 less for a PC than for a mac.

I got a Dell Inspiron 15... I'm hoping it's the right choice. :p