Aside from this, I will thank you for your defense of common sense.
There’s just too many easily mislead people out there in the world.

Given that I’d just end up running Windows on my Mac anyway, I have a Dell.

I’ve been barefoot on the Web since 1993, until two months ago when I got DSL and the router’s firewall was installed.

No viruses. Garageband – and a world full of audio tools if I want them. MS Office. Several browsers.

I find a lot of people identify, empathize, anthropomorphize their computers based on how involved they are with them. Updating antivirus and antispyware counts. You love your car because you wash it, too, not just driving it. Even though you didn’t buy it to wash.

I use XP Pro at work, and I have a laptop here at the house with XP on it, too. That makes it apparent that cheap hardware is the only thing that makes the OS viable. I know you’d hate Windows on 900MHz – I’ve fixed a friend’s 1.3 GHz Celeron box and it was pitiful – but OS X runs pretty swiftly on two G4s summing that speed. Why is it, now, that bunches of people and businesses are downgrading to XP from Vista?

It doesn’t matter to you, of course. I’ve been running this thing for eight years. I am ticked at Apple for cashing in on the “fix this” market, though, and for changing file architecture at least three times. I can’t run my copy of Excel v0.0B on this thing. But if you have something that works – and I acknowledge that tinkering is an enjoyable hobby – well, have at it!

Right now, Staples has a special on a 4-core Phenom box from HP for $700 that looks good. I’d have to subscribe to a couple of services, but I see the appeal.

That PC is cheap!

Perhaps it was a gift? Or perhaps he’s inspired by the same kind of misguided elitism that leads the stereotypical mac-head or linux-head to go out of his way to make a system that’s inferior for (you can’t get much more inferior than “just plain won’t run”) some of the most common user applications as his primary desktop.

For the record, Vista works fine. It has some annoying features and yes, it is bloated, but it’s stable enough, secure enough, and entirely functional. Really, it’s almost as good as XP.

XP blows OSX and Ubuntu clean out of the water in terms of usefulness for the home user. The chances are good that anyone who will tell you otherwise:
1) Has never used XP, and thinks it’s like Windows 95/98/ME (for reference, MacUsers, this is about like me evaluating OSX based on my extensive and mainly negative experience with OS9)
2) Is smoking or shooting something.
3) Actually knows something relevant that I don’t, in which case I’d like to know what it is.

I used Firefox for a while. Then I used Opera for a while. Then IE7 had tabbed browsing and worked fine and I realy haven’t bothered with anything else since.