If someone has the time and money, I'd recommend picking up both a Mac and PC portable of equivalent configurations and price. Get both of the packages together before cracking open either one.

If you didn't already start the comparison at the time of purchase (for example comparing Apple's store site to Dell's) then start at the box level.

Look at the presentation of both boxes and now start opening them. Progress a bit at a time on each one so you get to the different stages of unpacking at about the same time.

Next comes hooking them up and then booting for the first time.

Seriously, you (or anyone) will find this procedure very illuminating, even without comparing usage beyond 60 seconds once booted. And it's only a precurser to continued usage.

Mac OS 9 machines were simply not contenders for boxes running Windows 2000 or even 95/98 for that matter. I also couldn't get into the first release of Mac OS X. It was too much of a kludge. Things got better in 10.1 but still not quite there. As of 10.2 I could have used the OS as my primary. 10.3 just made things better and more recently 10.4 and revisions to all of Apple's bundled and commercial apps removed even more barriers.

I've been running a Mac PowerBook as my primary machine since the end of the summer in 2004. Prior to that my primary machines had been WIndows-based (I moved from 95/98 to 2000 when it first came out and then to XP when it first came out). I've been using both Macs and WIndows heavily for over 15 years. For the 8 years prior to summer 1995 my primary machines had been various Amigas with much less frequency PC and Mac usage - though I did work on both and also supported others on both).

I'm not a zealot, but Apple just been making a better product for the past few years. In fact I don't particularly even like the company itself and I really dislike Steve Jobs. Just don't tell Steve that.

Bruno