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... Mac has superior hardware. Not to say that you can't get great hardware otherwise. Hell, in many cases you can get more powerful hardware cheaper if you build a PC or get a top end brand. But you're going to to start getting up into the price of a Mac... so why not get a superior OS along with it. Apple makes great decisions in the hardware they use... there is no low end. This one of the reasons why when they choose something, they stick with it for a long time... they make the right choice up front and stick with it for a while. Towards the end of the production life of a given technology they end up making more money too because they're producing the same thing... which brings their cost down. I used to build all my own computers, always with the bleeding edge hardware available. But I've found that Apple really does have a strong formula for stability. These days, I'll sacrifice bleeding edge technology for more stability. Even my Mac mini is overpowered for my personal needs, my iMac is just ridiculous. Having said that... Macs can TOTALLY get viruses. It's a computer... even if an operating system were to run on millions of users computers for years on end without and exploit doesn't mean that there is no exploit. Something that is written by one man can be exploited by another. Macs do however have a lot working in their favor. First, it's a unix base. There is a reason why it's the chosen operating system for the most secure applications on the planet. I have ALWAYS run unix base here at TMN, I've been exploited but never through the operating system itself. I get between 10-500 hacking attempts every day on this server alone. Any security holes were due to 3rd party software running on the machine... not the operating system. RHE since day one btw. Second, which I believe will eventually change... security by minority... most people are using Windows so most people writing viruses are gearing them towards Windows machines. Most people that write viruses want to target the majority and they're also adept to IBM based machines. When more people are on Macs that will change... but Apple is going to make it much harder on them... so they stick to the easy money so to speak. Third, security by obscurity... if the hackers don't fully understand the command set of the hardware it's a lot harder to program viruses to exploit it. Apple is secretive in many aspects which keeps the hackers in the dark. Put a blindfold on a programmer and it's pretty hard for them to even begin to understand how to hurt you... information can however get leaked... but can also patched just as quickly. To be honest... I'm not wasting my system resources with antivirus software on my Macs either... but don't EVER think that you're safe just because you're on a Mac. There is no such thing. I don't care who says so... everything digital has a weakness, even the most cryptic can be exploited if you know the key to how it works. Even, in the future, if there is 1 in a Googolplex chance of it happening... there is still a chance. Like I said.. if it was made by a man... there is a man that can break it. (or woman, damn feminists... you know what I mean!) ... personally, I take the chance. I also took the chance on my PCs for the most part. I'm a strong believer in that you... for the most part... often infect yourself by being stupid. If you know what to look for, you can avoid a large majority of viruses. For me, I didn't care if everything got messed up... I reformatted nearly every month or so anyways. I'd rather have my resources free for myself ... A/V is a waste of computing power. Since I switched over to Mac the only time I've formatted a system drive was because I was upgrading the drive. I must say it's very nice not having to set all my stuff up every few months. .... and if I did, TIME MACHINE! BAM! Back to how it was. ... and for all you Mac haters... STFU and try one, stop talking sh*t on stuff you know nothing about. If you knew... you wouldn't talk sh*t... plain and simple. This is all coming from a former die hard Mac hater. Funny thing is, first computer I ever touched was Unix based (my Mom brought it home as surplus from the hospital she worked at... well still works at) then I grew up on Macs at school... loved them. They taught me to love computing. They lost their way in the early 90's but you know what... Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and set them back on the right path. Then they went to Intel... opening up development to more software manufactures. Now with their architecture and mindset there is NO excuse to hate them at this point other than ignorance. If you don't already, use a Mac for 1 month... then I dare you to go back. If you do as much on the computer as I do you'll feel like someone cut off your arms. It's the Microsoft way of thinking that's actually backwards, people have just been conditioned otherwise.

The thing with Apple and their operating system, and the reason why it doesn't "quite" bog down as much as Windows is known to do is due to the fact that it is practically a highly customized varient of BSD, a flavor of Unix. I like to call it "Bastardized" since you can pretty much run any Unix application you'd like on a Mac out of the box, but there are some things that just don't make sense. Apple did after all, take forever to become POSIX compliant, which began starting with Lion. But otherwise, UNIX as a heart it's obviously going to be a bit more stable. The file system I'm sure also has better management compared to NTFS, but I suppose it also depends on your use since each File System has their own performance characteristics too. FYI: I have a Windows 3.1 machine that still continues to run from this day, running an Intel 386. I also have a Dell Inspiron from 1999 with one of the original Mobile Pentium III CPUs, that thing continues to run Windows 2000 (and DSL or Knoppix, depending on whichever I decide to choose) and with the original battery, somehow it still holds 1 hour of charge. Some old desktops I built in the 90s and early 2000s are still going as well. All of my hardware goes through quite a bit of use. On all of the 16 systems I have at home (12 of which are still in full time use, all of the desktops are ones I've built), I've probably only had one GPU in one of the gaming systems go due to a design flaw with the card, which I could replace on the spot. One of the machines from 2002 actually runs Windows 7 Ultimate N 32-bit, and the thing is booting in 25 seconds flat from POST to desktop. Other than that, no hardware problems. Anyways, as far as the Mac goes, $1.7 Grand is a bit hefty for a machine with only an i5, 13.3" display and possibly Integrated Graphics (Sandybridge). For that sort of price I'd expect dedicated GPU from NVIDIA or AMD, a mid-range i7, perhaps an SSD along with a good chunk of RAM (8GB of DDR3 goodness with a high clock), oh and of course plenty of room to allow the fans to breathe, something Macs have issues with. If it's Intel HD Graphics anything with an I5 at 13.3" you're looking at a $1,000 machine from Apple with a Mechanical HDD and probably 4-6GB of RAM. Macs are well-built machines though, I will say that. I see plenty of older machines continuing to run just as well as they did the day they were unboxed. Oh yeah, UEFI = awesome. Macs have been in the EFI game for a while, which is amazing and part of the reason why they do boot quickly. BIOS is a dinosaur. UEFI support is still iffy on Mac but once you get it working, any capable OS takes literally no time at all on an SSD. 2 second boot time anyone?

I just looked on Apple's website and that MBP is $1199 - so that would be 749 British pound sterling 13-inch: 2.5 GHz 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz 4GB 1600MHz memory 500GB 5400-rpm hard drive Intel HD Graphics 4000 Built-in battery (7 hours) In Stock Free Shipping $1,199.00 And my wife's 2006 MacBook Pro is still going strong. All I've done to it is to max out the RAM and swapped the hard drive for. 500 GB 7200 rpm one. It's only a 1.83 GHz Core Duo but it still does everything we need it to pretty quickly. Stuck at OS 10.6.8 but that was a great OS. It's a little slow editing movies but runs web pages, email, Word, Excel, audio, etc plenty fast enough. And I still have her old 1988 Mac SE ($3250), and her 1994 PowerBook 540c (about the same price). They're fun to look at, and still run. I haven't had a virus on a Mac since about 1992. I quit buying anti-virus software about 1995.

Ooops Smith6612 sorry I missed your post and links , my bad on that , especialy thats got me thinking Picard is a French name ( from Picardy ) now I am wondering, as I thought ,are all French guys gay that vid don't help , LOL BTW that a in joke between the English and French , indeed the insults still flow both ways ,

Even just visiting the site is good enough for me

Not sure how much knowledge I'll be able to share. I am just learning about the vista stacks and what does what. If I stumble upon something i'll make sure to share though...lol

Welcome! We all know you'll LOVE it here

Welcome Lee! Your speeds look pretty good for your package. I hope you like TMN and help spread the word. Being a speed freak I hope you take the time to share your knowledge in our forums.