Despite the fact that I have used PC's for something like 15 years, God doesn't time fly, I have to say that Apple have finally tempted me!

The new iMac looks, sounds and performs superbly and now with the new Intel Core Duo processor sounds, to me, like the perfect computer.

One of the main reasons that I have previously always stuck with PC's was the fact that upgrading them was so simple to do. With the exception of my very first PC, a hugely expensive 486 running Windows 3.1, I've always built my own PC's and so if I wanted a new graphics card or CPU, I would just open it up, rip out the old one and whack in the new one. This was not only quick but, perhaps most importantly, cheap as well. PC hardware has always generally speaking been cheaper than Mac hardware which is actually one of the reasons why PC's are deemed to crash more often than Mac's as sometimes it appears as though the hardware or the driver for it, isn't as compatible with Windows as was originally thought. Apple on the other hand are a lot more stringent on the criteria of their hardware resulting in more stable machines. However this meant that because I usually would upgrade at least one part of my PC every year, Mac's where never a cost effective solution for me.

That is until now. My current PC is basically an old machine being that it's only a AMD 1800XP CPU with 1GB of RAM and still uses ATA133 drives and not the new SATA drives but I haven't felt the need to upgrade it as, for the first time since I've owned a PC, this spec is adequate to run all the programs I use such as Photoshop CSII, Dreamweaver 8, Flash 8, Fireworks 8 and MS Office. That's not to say I haven't wanted to upgrade my PC as I must admit I do find it slow to boot up but once running I can't really justify the extra expense required to upgrade as computer technology has moved on to such an extent that an upgrade now would have to be a major one involving replacing the motherboard, CPU, RAM and probably the hard drives as well, so basically a whole new PC!

So why now want to switch over to a Mac? Well as I have said my PC is old now and one or two Gremlins are starting to appear like for example it seems to be convinced that there are 3 DVD drives attached to it when there are only 2 and no amount of persuasion will convince it otherwise and the fact that every now and then the CPU will just decide to have a rest and run at about 1/3rd speed for a couple of minutes and then speed up again or that occasionally when I boot up it fails to see the SCSI card - mind you I've been meaning to remove that card for months since I no longer have any SCSI devices but that's beside the point. So basically in the not too distant future a new computer is on the cards and the iMac looks really, really cool

Now if only someone could tell me where I can get £1500 from.