Hi everyone,

I'm new to this Forum, just signed up! Nice to meet you all.

I was wondering if I could ask you all for your opinion. My old PC (laptop) is due to be replaced and I'm thinking about switching from PC to Mac and buying the new iMac (with the 20" screen). :eek:

At the moment I use my laptop mainly for photo editing (photography is my hobby), movie editing, blogging&websites, getting creative with Photoshop, surfing and for writing, which is my second hobby. (I use Word mainly and sometimes Open Office)
I want to make DVD's and just share my digital life (pictures and movies) with all my friends. I'd like to get as creative as I can with my pictures and movies, but my PC just can't handle it, it's too slow and I have to little memory. It crashes all the time... So I need a new one!

I've heard that Mac is just a better machine if you're a creative person like I am. I've been checking out the new iMac and its iLife06. It all just sounds great! And it seems so easy! It would be perfect for me... I think.

But I'm a bit hesitive to switching to a Mac. I've never used a Mac before as I've always been a PC/Windows user. I am a fast learner, but I fear that a Mac with its OS X is perhaps a too big of a change for me? :rolleyes:

Is there anyone out the who has some good advice for me? I'd appreciate it!

Thanks a lot! :mrgreen:

For what you want a Mac would be ideal and I'm sure you'll pick up Mac OSX in no time (not to mention the other advantages such as no spyware, viruses and when you buy the new machine it won't come with a load of free crap already installed).

If you already own software licences for Photoshop and MS Office it may be worth looking into parallels but both of these packages are available for the Mac too.

An alternative word processor (if MS Office is too expensive to rebuy and you want something native) is WriteRoom.

Thanks!

I agree with pty. For what you do, a Mac seems right for you.

I would also suggest you look at these threads that have previously discussed this:

• http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread66849.html
• http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread63597.html

Hope this helps

Welcome Orbi ...I also agree with pty and joe ... you might wanna give NeoOffice a try also it can read wirte MS Office stuff. For photography i use iLife iphoto as my light table and i have the option of setting my double click in iphoto to a full screen or going into Photoshop. I tried the Beta of Adobe Lightroom. but for simplicity I'm just using iphoto and photoshop on one computer and aperture and photshop on the desktop.

Good luch with your new computer

Thanks you all for the comments, I'll be sure to check out the links. So I guess it's going to be a Mac then! If all the finances work out,.. I'll be shopping for a Mac hopefully this coming weekend.

But first I want to go to the local Mac store here and check out the machines and get some more advice from the sales people. Perhaps they can also show me some stuff. I'll keep you updated!

Thanks again everyone!

Get a mac! You will be glad you switched especially with the leopard OS coming out. The way Microsoft gets their ideas is by copying Apple. Go to www.apple.com and do some looking around in Mac OS X. You will get all the details about the greatness of Macintosh

I agree with Junyah about NeoOffice. Since you already use OpenOffice, you'll find it nearly identical, since NeoOffice is basically a Cocoa port (type of OS X framework) of OpenOffice.

Since you use Microsoft Word, you may find AbiWord of use on the Mac platform.

My only problem is that NeoOffice doesn't have a Finnish spell check, as far as I could tell. And I don't know if AbiWord has either...
But I guess I can just download Open Office for Mac, right?

I don't know if Open Office X11 or Open Office Aqua has a finnish spell check but if it does you could possibly use them or are you going to use boot camp or parallels or VM on you mac ... you could run programs in there?