re: Mac longevity. My friends who swear by them have done very well over the years. Those of you who know the work of webmaster Fritz Jung (the wizard behind The Witches' Voice) may also know he is a Mac snob from way back...

For people doing work with graphics and art, they really are best. If you are doing a lot of database stuff, some recommend the PC; but then you have the Windows problem, still.

I bought a refurbished iMac from www.smalldog.com. A nice small company in Vermont. Buying a refurbished machine (to save $400) was a big mistake. It had serious problems with the analog video thingie and eventually caused the hard drive to crash. It was repaired under warranty but it took me a whole month to get it back from the shop. And the company would not simply give me a new one (though clearly their promise that refurbished machines were thoroughly checked out etc. was wrong in this case) because the repair was covered by warranty. However I DO think they are a great company to deal with; they were very responsive and willing to find different ways to help me if the repairs did not fix the problem.

The only problem I ever have now is occasionally the mouse or screen freezes; and since I use AOL, the AOL web browser crashes quite a lot; but that is AOL's fault, I think...

The iMac needs a memory upgrade as soon as you get it in order to do all the cool stuff Jeff Goldblum says you can do (desktop video and DVD etc.) but this is easy enough to purchase and install (that said I have not done it yet). Also it is a good idea to get a CD burner/disk writer since this one only has one CD drive and that's it; not very useful for copying information and using it elsewhere.

A new one of this model I have (with 54K modem) costs probably around $1200 now (around $1400 at the time I got mine). The newer model is of course more expensive. The iMac is quite user-friendly, too.

Oh, and since someone will ask: Sage.

Peg