My work Dell (D600) was brilliant under Win2k - really fast hibernate and re-awakening (11 seconds to boot!) but under XP it really sucks. Hibernate does not work at all, so I have to use standby - which has never failed to lose work if I have any apps open! It also fails to cope with USB devices or networks being changed while in Standby under XP. It was fine with all these under WIn2k.

Luckily, except for connecting to the corporate LAN, I can run it in Linux for all other occasions and it runs beautifully. It is a good machine.

I quite like MAC OS X, but still feel it has some way to go and it misses out on a lot of the things I would use regularly, so in my opinion a good PC laptop with Linux will always beat an Apple machine (but from your needs I think Apple is the way to go for you)

Hmmm - turned into a bit of a blether...can you tell I'm really hacked off at XP. Soooo blimming sucky!!! Why would anyone write an OS like this? Aaaaarrkkkk!