Switching from PC to Mac and need advice

i think you should blow the budget and spend more than $500 to get yourself a new or refurbished mac which has quite good specs and will last you whenever buying a computer always always blow your budget and get as much as you can afford E.g dont just spend $500 because it is a nice amount to spend and you will have lots of money left over.

Spend as much as you possibley can

herbiemac said:

Or this one.
PowerMac G4 800 MHz
Apple Power Mac G4
800MHz 256MB Ram Mac OSX 10.3.9
DVD/CDRW
40 GB INTERNAL DRIVE

Applications Include Adobe CS (Photoshop,Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Professional), GoLive, Microsoft Office.....etc

Keyboard & Mouse, Original User Guide/Cd's

Great Condition, great performance $400obo

Click to expand...

In my humble opinion, it seems strange for somebody to include adobe CS suite for that price. That's a pretty expensive software package I'd guess, even if it is 2 versions behind.

Anyway, why don't you consider a NEW mac mini? They don't come installed with a ton of memory by default, but they are new. The base model is 100 bucks over your budget, but I bet if you saved for a bit longer (depending on your income) you could afford one. And, if you took a bit longer to save the money, maybe you could even wait for the october release of Leapord, and you'd have everything for not too much more...

And you'd have a warranty, and that fuzzy feeling you get when you buy a new apple product

Though, no dedicated video card means some of the higher end video editing software might be a bit more painful to work with..

I appreciate the feedback. The machine I would love to buy is probably about $2k but there is no way I can justify that right now.