Hello I would like to add my 2p to this.

I had a HP running XP, I would rebuild it every 3-6 months, starts very fast, then I would run all the SP's and Fixes, and it would be back to same slow boot up speed. Very very slow. It's a good processor but the HDD would spend all day loading.

After quite a bit of research I decided to try a Mac, I was a bit apprehensive because I still do development in Visual Studio, but as destere said, I've never looked back.

I bought the 17inch Unibody MacBook Pro in March this year, I agree that it's a lot of money for a laptop but I was just fed up with the troubleshooting and hacking I had to do with XP, i really don't have the time to do this any more, I needed something that works out of the box and the MBP fulfilled this.

I still need to run Windows Apps so I use VMWare Fusion, though Parallels is good and you can also get Sun's VirtualBox for FREE. In fact I have found that XP is more stable on VMWare!!!

Pros
- Good reliable hardware (so far)
- OS is very stable (with Snow Leopard on the horizon - more speed increases on their way)
- OS upgrade to only cost $29 (how much to upgrade XP/Vista etc..)
- User Interface so intuitive
- No known viruses/trojan horses to infect the mac (though there Trojan horses but that's through installing pirated software from BitTorrent)
- No need for Anti-virus/
- Can still run XP/Vista using Virtual Machines technology (VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion/Parallels/Bootcamp)
- At least 6-7 hours battery use for my MBP17
- in OSX extra software built in whereas in XP/Vista you have to buy
- Just one desktop version of MacOSX (none of this Vista Home, Light, Ultimate, Superduper..... and whatever they call it)

Cons
- Mac UK Keyboard slightly different, eg: @ in the different place but not a huge learning curve
- I'm having trouble connecting up a dual-screen setup at home
- Very expensive in comparison to a PC.