I got a dual 1900+ athlon box (from alienware, don't buy from them, terrible customer service) about 6 months ago and have been extremely pleased. the little problems here and there that you hear about really aren't that bad (well, at least for what I do on it, which is mostly photoshop, illustrator, and web browsing), and the speed is really worth it. it took a while getting used to XP, but I found it pretty easy to navigate and fool with the settings after I got situated.
I've had two BSODs, neither of which have caused me to lose work, and the comp was fine on startup (on a related noted, I've had two 10.1.x kernal panicks and 1 in jag). although I approached the machine with a lot of prejudices, being a mac-only user before buying it, it's really won over quite a bit of my trust. I haven't had much time play with the dual ghz machines, but compared to my dual 500 g4 and my 800 tibook, the dual athlon runs everything faster and has been far more responsive. I was able to edit about 5-10 gigs of PSDs (I forget exactly how much it was, but it ate ~30 gigs in scratch! O_O) in one sitting (opening them all at one time) without hardly any troubles, especially in the last half... when I tried opening them on my dual G4, it took 10 minues to force quite PS7 after waiting 40 mins for it to try to open all the files (10.1.5). PS7 on my 800 tibook in 9.2.2 is about as responsive as the PC, which is what really counts for me (I could care less about filter render times, etc).... it's really sad how slow jag is in some areas, especially the interface items (menus, checkboxes, scrolling). I just find it so utterly annoying when I have to make long mouse click to do the simplest things in jag. I know its like half a sec or whatnot, but IMO those parts of the interface really need to respond quickly.... I've only been able to play around briefly with a dual ghz G4, but I was really surprised to find that my 800 tibook was not substantially faster than my dual 500 box even though it got a clean install of jag and runs so great in 9.2.2.
I still love doing php development and other web thingies on my mac, and there are other things about jag and OS9 that I really like... over the past 6 months I've found that I tend to like both boxes about the same, and I doubt that I'll ever be able to buy a new computer without buying one of each
he he
I know I'm talking out of my a**, but I really think that PCs are underappreciated here...I've yet to have a horror story with mine. to each his own
it seems that holding out till late next year would be a good idea with all the new stuff that's appears slated for then...
