Alex were do we start mate - maybe ribena with its supposed vitamin C content
Dujon, i got into macs soley because my best mate was an apple tech/evangalist - so i never paid for much right from the start

since then i have known several mac techs - and only one still is purely mac because
theres nothing to do - not enough work in returns/repairs coz hardly anything goes wrong with 'em - one even became a full on PC tech as well just to find some work LOL, of which he found plenty of course, to do with PC's. do you realise that apple make their techs sit the exam
every year whereas PC techs, once they have done the relevant course for a specific version, thats it done, for the rest of their lives!
I understand what your saying re RAM, in the bad ol days, its been many years since you had to buy their specific brand of memory (their is no apple memory anymore), and yes it was a ripoff, you could of used the equivalent PC memory as it turned out, but you would of voided your warranty if anything went wrong.
Macs have come a LOOOOOOONNNGGG way from then. they arent perfect, but please tell me about a large company that is perfect? and there has been some bad QC at times in recent years - it seems if someone has one bad experience with apple, and then they bad mouth them for the rest of their lives! do they do tht with MS stuff?
having said that, at the time when i first got into macs, the mac OS was light years ahead of windoze 98 and 2000 ect. The gap narrowed greatly with advent of SP2 XP, thats for sure, I use XP on my dell lappy, and its pretty damn good, but i had been a mac user for so long, i dont see why i should stop altogether?
Hi Dave, isnt that 'macs are pretty' another putdown thing I hear from PC evangalists, funny now you guys have the pretty looking vista

sucked in bigtime LOL yeh maybe the budget models for schools and little kids are that way, whats wrong with not being a boring beige or black box? btw my dual chip G5 tower is actually SEXY and stately, and i wouldnt buy one of those silly looking monitors if you paid me ! hmmm i seem to remember you had a bad experience with an faulty ipod from memrory, is this the source of grudge?