I do a lot of writing and the screen is bright enough to keep me from getting headaches after long periods of time, regardless of the lighting and ambience in the room.

I highly suggest the Sony VAIO (Sony has some of the highest ratings for video/graphics quality). The model I’ve used for the past year is the VGN-FS series.

BestBuy usually carries them.

Check out the link: http://b2b.sony.com/Solutions/subcategory/notebooks/fe-series-gallery

I swear ‘by’ this laptop, not ‘at’ it.

Regards,

Nick S

But it’ll probably be at least another month before I make my final decision.

I think Office was the only thing I ended up paying for twice when I switched. I tried OpenOffice a while back and gave up on it pretty quickly. I suppose I should check out the newer versions. The only MS Office app I have trouble with on the Mac, though, is Entourage. It’s a steaming pile of shit, not to put too fine a point on it. I use it at work only because my office’s IT group makes me; otherwise I’d just use Mail or Thunderbird or any of the half-dozen mail apps that do work properly.

The current version of Word for the Mac lacks the master document feature, for reasons I’ve never been able to determine. I haven’t checked yet to see whether the upcoming version will fix that. I gather not many people use it, but I’ve always thought it was kind of a handy way to link chapter-documents into a single novel-file. It wasn’t an earth-shattering loss, in the end.

I would wait for Macworld San Francisco (Jan 9) to see the new updates and get a handle on when the next version of OS X (Leopard) will be released.

It will include a feature called Time Machine which will support backup and versioning for all your documents. It seems like this would be a great feature for a writer where you want to be extra careful you don’t lose anything you’ve written. I’m not sure how it will work on a laptop, since the description focuses on using it with external drives to hold the backup copies, but I think it would still be interesting to you.

When you do get a Mac, post again to ask which apps you should look into. Every Mac board out there has at least one master thread about the best software out there, or the apps that people can’t live without.

I’ve always found OpenOffice on the PC to be a big joke. I admit I haven’t spent a lot of time with it, but from my limited experience it’s ugly, unstable, and buggy in the extreme. But hey, it’s hard to beat free. If I go the Mac route, I’ll check out Neooffice.

As for the waking up from sleep thing… yeah, that’s always been a gripe with the Windows boxes. Ten seconds minimum before the hourglass goes away.

Yes. Most FF plugins and themes are cross-platform.

Definitely get a Mac. I switched four years ago and I will never, ever buy another Windows-based machine. (Background: I was a Windows tech support monkey in college.) There’s no comparison. That “it just works” quality? No lie.

I don’t especially like the keyboards and mice that come with Macs, but there’s an easy solution: toss them out and plug in your old ones. I’m addicted to Microsoft’s split keyboards (I’ll admit they make good hardware, just not software!) and it’s a breeze to use; the Windows key maps to the Apple (cmd) key, and F12 becomes the Eject button.

In addition to Boot Camp, there’s Parallels, which I hear can now run Windows apps as if they’re Mac apps. Looks good; I’m definitely going to have to get a copy for testing web designs in IE (which Microsoft has just made easier).

For fewer I-just-lost-two-hours-of-work moments, try an app like Scrivener (look for beta 4 in the forum) or one of the many other apps that autosave as you go and have built-in versioning. I’ve recently switched from CopyWrite to Scrivener. It’s a delight.

The biggest thing for me is that everything looks so much better. Surfing the web is a completely different experience on a Mac.

Buying Mac versions of all your old software is a pain, no question, but some companies will let you migrate for free — notably Adobe, which is extra-spiffy now that they own Macromedia’s suite. Dreamweaver and Photoshop are too damned expensive to buy twice.

I’ve never seen a Windows laptop not whine and bitch coming out of sleep mode.

Me either. The first G4 Powerbook I encountered was in sleep mode, sitting on someone’s desk. The little power indicator light on the back of the screen pulses when it’s asleep. The laptop snores. I was instantly charmed.