I hope this helps.
P.s. can't be bothered to read though it to check for spelling or grammatical mistakes so I apologise in advance.
You can do what you need to do on both a Windows PC and a Mac.
I use both daily and I prefer Macs, The operating system feels cleaner, I don't get frustrated like I do on a pc, this may be because when I program crashes it doesn't take the mac operating system down with it, like with a PC. And so all these restarts I have to do with my pc just doesn't happen with my mac.
Image editing - for simple editing like getting rid of red eye or lightening the picture you can use iPhoto, I love this program, it allows you to catalogue all your pictures and movies from your camera. for more serious editing I use photoshop, its very very good, but also very very expensive, if you already have photoshop for windows you will still need to buy it for the Mac.
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Dv Editing - iMovie is very good, use it very rarely, normally just to play around with it. Obviously for heavier editing finalcut express can be used available from apple.
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Word processing - you can get microsoft office 2004 for the mac, which is in my opinion far superior than microsoft office 2003 for windows, the formatting palette in which all the tasks that you may do most often are in the palette so you don't have to go through menus and buttons to perform them.
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If you need to use windows at any time you can use virtual pc which is an emulator my Microsoft allowing you to run windows xp and windows xp programs on the Mac. Its quite slow though and is very demanding on RAM.
The operating system is very cool, more stable and as far as I am concerned Virus and spyware free for the moment. Switching to a mac took me about 9 months to consider, I played with macs for hours and read books before I switched, there are even books about switching, I have 2 of them. If you do decide I would recommend getting a book about Tiger so you can learn about it.
If I think you should switch, I really can't tell you, If you are a user expecting not to have to learn anything new, then I wouldn't switch. I leant my mum my powerbook, shes been a windows user since shes worked, she only uses a computer when she has too and so doesn't now much other than routine things. She was phoning me up every five minutes asking me how to do stuff on the Mac, I would recommend that she doesn't switch.
However from the sounds of it you seem to know a lot more, you may fine it weird switching because somethings you are used to on windows like using the cross at the top right of an application would close the application. well on the mac this would only close the application window not the application, and the fact that the cross is on the left side anyway! another thing that bothered was print preview, they open up in preview and not in a special print preview mode so that you can change the page layout to suit your needs.
I switched when Jaguar had just come out, is was good, but panther and now tiger are great! spotlight in tiger is very good, but the best feature for me, is expose, this when you press F9 resizes all the application windows you have open, you can then click on the one window that you want to work on, I love that! F11 moves all the applications off the desktop so that you open files living on your desktop.
In a nutshell, you could buy a Mac or you could buy a PC, if you buy an Mac G5 is the way to go, I would recommend at least 1Ghz of ram! the operating system is hungry and needs loads of Ram. Powermacs are great, I will get one when I can afford one, the apple cinema displays are amazing as well! G5 iMacs are very good, may not be as fast because you can order dual processor Powermacs, but you do get an all in one design which will save space.For Dv editing a Powermac with its dual layer burning at 16X will certainly be a plus point, the Powermac will also allow you to upgrade more easily like change the graphics card etc. On the PC side, Dells in my opinion are cheaply made, and the service is the worst ever, I phoned them up to book an engineer the indian man didn't even understand me!!!
at least if you apple goes wrong you will speak to someone that understands you. In terms of price difference, The Mac will always be the more expensive, but with that few hundred pounds more, you get get a a better quality system, thats been designed to suit the consumers needs, and that makes using it enjoyable, not like the "me too" computer boxes you have to put up with.
1 last thing, when you own a mac, you become part of the mac community, we help fellow mac users on any problems they have.
