Upgrading from a Dell to a Mac?

I have a 4 year old Dell Inspiron 8000 Laptop that is very quickly out growing its usefullness. In September or October I was thinking of buying one of those Mac Minis. How much of an upgrade in performance am i going to get?

Here are the specs of the Insipron 8000 and the potential Mac Mini....
Dell:
Windows XP Home
Pentium 3, 1 Ghz, 256 RAM
20 GB Hard Drive

Mini:
Mac OS X
1.42GHz PowerPC G4
512MB DDR333 SDRAM - 1 DIMM
80GB Ultra ATA drive
4x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Internal Bluetooth + AirPort Extreme Card
Wired Keyboard & Mouse Set

Is this a substantial upgrade or should I just save up some more money and wait until January and buy a (hopefully upgraded) iMac G5? I dont want to buy a Mini if it is only going to provide a marginal upgrade over my laptop.

Mav451 said:

As always, we must ask:

What are you using it for?

If Internet browsing/email are the first things out of your mouth, you're fine.

Click to expand...

It would be primaraly for that. That is basically what I use my current computer for. I have never really been into video games on the computer (that's what PS2 is for. lol) My fiancee is going to start a wedding photography business in a year or so. Som i would imagine we would do some LIGHT photoediting in Photoshop Elements. We would probably use iPhoto as part of it as well. other than that, there isnt much. We will probably buy Reunion 8 in the near future, but that should run just fine on a mini.

As for the pro stuff, I want to get into more video stuff, but when i do I am going to buy a PowerMac to dedicte just to video and audio work.

Rocksaurus said:

In that case, why not just get the Powermac?

Click to expand...

That's a year or 2 down the line.