<p>wsuwarrior10, as a user of both macs and pcs i can say that networking is just as easy on both machines so long as you aren’t going cross platform. if you want to share files over a network on Macs and PCs you have to enable some settings. It’s doable for sure, just a bit of tweaky around on both systems. i actually bought a Mac Mini just to learn the OS X. It’s definitely easy to learn and I recommend it to some people depending on the things they do. However you’ll never catch me using a Mac as a primary computer that’s for sure. I can come up with a list of things that isn’t straight forward on the OS X and requires tweaking that is easily available on a XP/Vista machine. The one thing that is hard to dispute is that Macs do maintain better value over time than a similarly priced PC.</p>
<p>tetrahedr0n, spec for spec, you can definitely build a PC for cheaper. How fast the OS boots up is all relative to the specs on your machine of course.</p>
<p>toxic_waste, any machine running Vista will run fine so long as the machine was build to run Vista. I use Vista and have used most flavors of XP (Tablet Edition, Media Center, Pro, Home, except x64) and I could never go back to XP. Vista just loads so much quicker and handles my programs so much better. I only use XP on my tablet because that’s what it came with. Most complaints about Vista stem from 3 things: software compatibility, drivers, and hardware. The first two are not the fault of the OS as it’s up to the software developers to make their programs compatible with each new OS that comes out. A lot of these companies had the beta and RC versions of Vista for a while and still didn’t develop or update as needed. The last issue is mainly the fault of the computer manufacturers putting Vista on machines that have the minimum req. for Vista. All three were issues with XP when it first came out as well. And indeed, as with XP all three were improved after a year. I’ve used Leopard and Vista and I personally like Vista better. OS X makes it so simple that some options you’d get on Vista can’t be configured unless you go into terminal and use the respective commands.</p>