You more than likely wouldn't have had any issues with XP.

I'll keep that in mind, but I doubt I'll ever intentionally buy or run another MS product again for quite a while. MacOS X kicks its butt in many ways, and the majority of the apps for which people are forced to stay with Windows I couldn't care less about. It's too bad that Mac hardware costs so much more than generic PC stuff (and I'll take a look at building stuff myself, like some folks on here have done), but I'm willing to pay that price for usability.

I don't mean to come off like a shill for Apple -- I run a lot of other Unix OSes, like Solaris, OpenBSD, and Linux, and MacOS X has some issues, too, mostly UI related -- but it continues to amaze me how much Windows sucks, and it pisses me off, again, how everyone now expects computers to not function correctly. XP may well be better, but I doubt I'll ever know.