[johniegrad]

My wife wants a new notebook for her birthday. I think I am finally tired enough of Microsoft that I will buy her a MacBook Pro.

[Moose4]

Were it not for the fact that I tend to use my machine a lot for gaming, and those games don’t have Mac versions (Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 and a few online games), I would switch to a Mac at this point. I have no need for a bloated, intrusive OS like Vista, and I’m pretty pissed that Microsloth is now going to ram it down our throats.

}:-)4

[DonaldC]

It seems that many IT companies are in the mode of, “how can we drive away our customers as quickly as possible.”

I’m not sure of linux can fill the gap for most users, although I like the product, but this could be a big boost for Apple.

[vox humana]

I am finally tired enough of Microsoft that I will buy her a MacBook Pro.

Good decision. I bought my first Mac in 1991 and have never had a PC. Virus? What's that? Never had one on any of my Macs in 16 years.

[Ouderkirk]

Don’t forget to put Linux on that Mac.

OS/X is as bad as Windows Vista

[ameribbean expat]

do it. two weeks ago i bought a new toshiba notebook with vista loaded. vista is absolute crap and you need to do very close research on which of your periperals have vista drivers. this was my last msft purchase. buck fill.

[CodeMasterPhilzar]

Consider Linux as a serious alternative. I have Simply Mepis (an Ubuntu/Debian based distro) on an old IBM Thinkpad - A21M IIRC... (Pentium III at 800 MHz, 192MB memory, 20GB HDD) Works fine for what I want/need. I have Suse on my desktop (for now, probably going to Mepis soon) and Red Hat on a server and my son's computer. Knoppix as a live CD to fix the windows boxen in the house. ;-)

If you want to have a secure, relatively virus-immune system, you can't go wrong with Linux and one of the popular distros. I've used Red Hat Fedora Core series, Suse, Knoppix, and Mepis. If you're looking for:

email - Thunderbird (included in most distros)
web browsing - Firefox (also included)
word processing, spreadsheet, the occasional presentation - OpenOffice (also included)
work with digital pictures - GIMP (also included)
play digital music - Amarok (may have to find/install)
calendar/to-do list - Kontact (also included with KDE)

Who needs MS and all their expense, bug fixes, viruses, exploits, etc.??? All, ALL of the above can be had for free (well, time downloading and a CDR or seven) and perfectly legal. Updates are more timely and focused than MS.

Instead of Vista being a "no-brainer" upgrade, the real question is rapidly becoming "why MS at all?" Anyone who has ever played with the beryl 3D interface on top of Linux will never go back. ;-)