New Computer

A G4? They haven't made those in awhile. You get it on eBay or something?

The eject key on the keyboard opens the optical drive. P.S. Welcome to the enlightened side of computing.

I read your statement at the end about switching despite saying you never would, but your "arguments" are pretty common and, really, quite silly. So I'm posting as a general statement to people who share your sentiments...

Well, you pay for quality. That being said, virtually all of their computers are well in line with industry standards. Build a similar system from another competitor (reputable competitor) and you'll find they run about the same - especially the laptops.

Apple gouges people on RAM, sometimes by like 4x or 5x. Buy your RAM from a reputable store and you'll be fine and save plenty of money. No denying that if you "build one yourself" or buy a cheapie off-brand you can save money. But good luck with that... And Apple has never admitted that they overcharge for looks. The say people appreciate design, but they've never said they charge more for it. Also, Apple has retail stores. Yeah, whoopty... except they provide support at the Genius Bar. Most computers will have you call India. Apple lets you come in and talk with someone.

Incredibly, incredibly wrong. Was barely even true 10 years ago let alone today.

Heck, an Apple laptop was named the best WINDOWS laptop on the market by PC Magazine (or something). Which means to say that in the worst case, you can run Windows ON your Mac, either simultaneously with Mac OS X or separately in a dual booting setup. I've been running Windows XP for over a year. That's how I've been testing the Windows version of Scorecard. If you don't want to install Windows on your Mac, well, Macs have Office. Macs have top-of-the-line browsers. Macs have the same software you're going to find everywhere else, and it's usually better.

So are you. Neener neener.

See? You will be... uhh... dis-assimilated? Un-assimilated?

Aside from some underpowered Macs (the "Performa" line, among a few others) back in the early to mid 1990s, Macs have used high-quality components. Some people had (legitimate) complaints about how slow Apple was to adopt disc burning drives, but basically every computer they ship these days comes with a DVD-R drive standard.

I'm not going to claim that Apple uses the highest-end parts, because that'd be easy to disprove, but Apple does use the best consumer-level parts available to them. They use Western Digital, Seagate, etc. hard drives. They use high-quality RAM and chips. Good motherboards. Good wireless chips. Solid optical drives. The area where I will say Apple is on top of the league (except for the super-small-niche stuff) is the fit and finish of their computers. They all feel solid and look like they're put together really well. Apple makes computers that feel like the car door closing on a very good car. Apple's had a few problems with their hardware. Jeff Smith (on this site) had a problem out of warranty with his iMac - Apple covered it for him because it was a known issue. Apple has been very good about extending warranties for known issues, and the number of problems they have is well below that of others. A bit of disclosure: I've been a long-time Mac user. I like to think that I'm just using the tool that best suits what I do and enjoy, and that I'm free of the fanboy crap most people have. I've worked FOR Apple, in retail (Mac Genius) as well as in engineering, and I continue to use Macs to this day and write software for them. Even won an Apple Design award a few years ago. PCs have their purpose... One of the big reasons used to be gaming. Now more than ever I think that's the realm of consoles.

If the goal is to transition from Windows to the Mac, you probably don't want to dual boot. You'll probably want to install Parallels (parallels.com) or VMWare. You can run Windows in a window, as it is. I do this. Sharing files this way is very easy.

My hunch is that, with even a teeny bit of effort, you'll being using the Mac side more and more and the Windows side less and less as time goes on. If you want to boot only into Windows or Mac OS at any one time, you'll have separate partitions, yes, and use Boot Camp (free from Apple): http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bootcamp.html

If you use Parallels or VMWare, it'll "mount" a little hard drive. You can drag and drop copies of files back and forth or set up shared folders (I like to do that with my Downloads directory).

If you're using Boot Camp, I'm not sure. I haven't used it.