Don,
A good friend of mine owns 2 Apple retail stores. He showed me Windows XP and Vista running on a MacBookPro using Parallels software back in January. I immediately ordered a MacBook Pro 15" for me, and a MacBook for my daughter for her school work. A few weeks later, I ordered a MacPro 8-core which I received in March.
Adobe did a cross-platform upgrade which allowed me to get PS CS3 for the Mac by destroying my PC copy of CS2 for the upgrade price. I also was a beta tester for Adobe Lightroom so they gave me a copy of the final retail version for my contributions.
I retired my Dell Precision 470 workstation (4GB RAM, Quadra FX graphics card, 320 internal RAID drives and for sale now if someone wants to make me an offer) and a Dell Latitude laptop. My 2nd Dell Dimension 8200 was given to my son (9 yrs old) to play his piles of PC games. His old PC was donated to the church.
I could not be happier with the switch. I upgraded all 3 Macs to Leopard the weekend it was released. I had some issues that forced me to do a clean install on my MacBookPro and MacPro, but it was easy since I have greatly reduced the number of programs that I need because the Macs come complete with software. I still need to run Windows XP on my MacBookPro for my financial planning practice because of industry specific software is PC only. I run Windows using Parallels and I have my Dell 27" wide display attached to my MacBookPro so that I can run programs on both OSes side-by-side. This configuration runs WinXP better, more reliably and faster than either of my old Dell PCs. The best of both worlds so to speak. Now that I run both OS at the same time most of the work day, it has become painfully apparent how much easier it is to do things on the Mac with less software and with less fuss.
The only hick up now is that Eizo does not yet have a Leopard compatible calibration program for my ColorEdge CE240W monitor that I use in my MacPro for critical color work. They claim that it will be released in mid-Janauary. Fortunately, I saved the monitor profile created with the previous OS before the upgrade and it seems to work okay.
I reformatted my external Lacie drives to Mac HFS+ and now things are rocking. Macs just work better and with less fuss than PCs.
I also replaced my Linksys wireless networking, wireless printer controller and BuffaloTech NAS drive with 2 Apple Airport Extremes. I attached a Iomega drive in RAID 1 (redundant 750GB mirror drives) to the USB port on one of the Airport Extremes to use as a network storage device and backup. The Iomega is Mac-formatted so I no longer worry about the Buffalotech and it's proprietary Linus drive format.
Regarding your PC formatted drives, there is a utility program that you can install on your Mac that will allow it to read PC formatted drives (Fat32 and NTFS. You can get it at this link:
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/If you have a PC and want to read Mac formatted drives, there is a commercial product available called MacDrive.
I agree with a previous poster's comments that the PC vs Mac "debate" can get pretty emotional. As I have done, you can get great results with either platform. I think that Adobe has done a fantastic job of providing cross-platform capabilities being user friendly. But, from my experiences supporting several PCs, printers and scanners in my small business for the past 15 years, the Macs simply work more reliably and are easier to use. My time devoted to troubleshooting and being a PC tech have been greatly reduced since switching to Macs.
There must be a reason while most of the professional creative community is using Macs compared to PCs. I think it's because they want to focus on their work and not the technology. Enough said.
Good luck.
Bud James
North Wales, PA.