mac or pc

Its really up to you, I would suggest going down to the store and trying out both a mac and a PC and see which one you like better! I personally love the PC for a few reasons:

1 - Is that they are much more modular and upgrading is generally much more feasible and usually at a much lower cost due to having more non-proprietary pats unlike the MAC.

2 - There is a little more variety in software for the PC, however recently I have been very impressed in the amount of software now available for the MAC. For your purposes that you listed this would not be an issue

Also I just wanted to point out that the new windows 7 is an excellent operating system! It is very rock solid and very good with resource management! There should be no worries of windows performing sub-par Also for your peace of mind windows millennium is BY FAR the worst operating system Microsoft has ever made! :)

also one other suggestion I would make is to upgrade the processor to a quad core, as it is not much more money and the performance gain would be large as well you would have a computer more capable of handling future programs.

Like I say find out what you like and go with that! after all it is your money and you are the one who is going to use it!

Hope this helped

Jeff