I am leaning towards buying my MBP in person at an Apple Store mostly because I don't want to have to transfer my hard drive myself.
I assume that the Apple guys will do it for me at the store after my purchase, but what is that process like? Is it fairly quick, so I can just hang out until it is done? Or will I have to come back another day? Also, I don't really need everything transfered over, just select things (music, photos, some word documents, and a couple programs), can I specify this to the Apple employee doing my transfer?
Whether you want to transfer the files yourself depends on you and what you are comfortable doing. I've been told that the Apple store employees will do it for you. How long it takes depends on how much you want to transfer over. If you have several gigs of data then it will take possibly a few hours. You can always come back to pick up your new Mac and old computer later in the day. They will probably call you when it's done.
To make things easier for them you can put all the files you want into one large folder on your PC right now. Just so you know, you can't transfer over Windows programs to a Mac. Even if you have Windows installed on your Mac, Windows requires you to reinstall programs.
The other option is to do it yourself with an external hard drive. That depends on whether you feel you are up to the task. It's not hard. Only you can answer that question.
Safari and Chrome are probably your best Mac browsers right now, with Firefox being rather clunky and slow in my experience.
That is a personal preference opinion. I won't say Safari is horrible like the other person because it's a good browser. I do like Firefox more and it has some built in features I like which I find missing from Safari and Chrome. They are all free so best choice is to try them all out and see which one you end up liking.
Thanks for the advice. So would you suggest then that my best course of action is to buy the MBP online, buy another copy of Windows XP (I have seen them online easily under $100), and buy an external hard drive to both transfer my hard drive and serve as a back up?
Any suggestions on an easy to use external hard drive?
The choice is up to you like I said earlier. Do you feel comfortable doing everything yourself? The benefit of going in store is that you can ask questions before buying and talk to the Genius workers before buying. Many people on this forum are comfortable with computers and don't have a problem doing everything themselves.
Installing Windows you have to do that yourself so get another copy of Windows. As for an external hard drive, you can get any but ones with Firewire are faster than USB only hard drives. This will make your file transfers go a lot quicker. It's good to have a backup hard drive so you should get an external one no matter what. You will have to format your hard drive in order to make them work on Macs but you can ask about that later once you get it.