Been thinking about retiring my 3 yr old Dell to "kid duty" and either building a new Vista ready system or making the switch to a Mac. Seems like everything I've been reading about Vista is it's a "chrome plated turd", but also realize there is a lot of anti-MS sentiment out there - and it seems like they said the same about XP when it first arrived.

 
I'm also skeptical about Mac - not due to performance, but the learning curve. I know they are quite similar to Windoze (or vice versa), but there is still the learning cure involved in a different operating system. We tend to do a lot of DVD/video editing and everyone points to Mac as the go-to system for this kind of work. We really don't run too much software that can't be found for a Mac - mostly web browsing, etc.

However, a preliminary check on pricing of Macs danged near gave me sticker shock! They seem to be at least TWICE as expensive as a similar XP/Vista system. In discussing this today with a guy who is fairly competent in computers, I was told that a Mac makes much better use of system resources than Windows based machines, and that a person can get by with less processing power, RAM, and drive space - thus a cheaper system, but still more expensive than a better-equipped Windows machine. Any truth to this? Also, how are Macs for user friendliness when it comes to upgrading? Is adding a larger or an additional HD a fairly straight forward process, for example?

Thanks in advance!