G'day,

Well I've finally decided to move from the dark side into the light. I've been a passionate hater of windows now for some 12 or so years and you might well ask, "What took you so long?"

Well that's complicated, partly because of a severe 'accident' some 11 years ago which left me largely vegetated for a couple of years... now reduced to just partially vegetated.

However, the main reasons were, my dependence on my Lotus Smartsuite, but particularly my Lotus Organizer and Palm which I use to keep myself on track after my 'accident'; I've got cognitive problems and no short term memory, but also partially because some of the other PC software I was attached to (nothing from Microsoft!) such as John Walker's HomePlanet.

Anyway, I'm here to solicit help in my decisions.

Firstly I'm reasonably sure it will be a Mac Pro, since I'm a vidographer with a Sony HDRHC1 camera. By background I'm a Metallurgist/Engineer and I was blown away when I looked inside a Mac Pro. I've owned Laptops but I don't believe they have the power of a desktop, nor the fixability.

I'm probably going to wait till Macs sort out the Bluray thing, which I'm hoping will be before say August.

To be honest I am a little blown away by the prices of Mac gear, such as hard drives, monitors and RAM, but I'm hoping you guys; and by this I mean girls as well, will help me out with such incidental matters.

Anyway guys, thanks for your time and I will pop in from time to time to ask possibly inane questions about Macs, both prior to my buying one and most definitely after I've 'moved into the light' and actually own one... see ya

Beam

First off sorry about your accident! Second off glad you've decided to switch I'm sure you'll enjoy it on "the light side", anything like RAM and HDDs buy after market from sites like www.newegg.com and www.macsales.com, as for monitors the apple ones are nice but not needed get a dell or hp or sony or anything else, they all work! Oh and welcome to the forums!

G'day
Pommie here ! Sorry to hear about your accident. I switched in '98 because I wanted something better then windowdoze for my photography and I have never looked back. Macs are great, you will enjoy using them once you settled in and got use to it. I use photoshop cs2, dreamweaver and flash for websites, I've accounts software, I use pages and ilife and I really have no use for windowdoze at all. I run a Mac Pro 2.66 and its great. You'll find that the software is a lot more intuitive and the whole mac ethos is better. I agree with Vindicat3d buy as much as possible from after market sites online.