ronmatt

I have both platforms. The G5 with Tiger and a PC, (originally a Dell 8200 that I had upgraded at a local comp service).
I keep both machines in an enclosed environment ( virtually dust free ) and have routed an air conditioning vent ,from my house central air, to the enclosure (about 4"x4"). I also have a Dell 4300 that is prioritized for the internet. I do contract pre-press ( pre-flighting, fixing files and imposing in Preps ) on the Mac. with PSCS, Ill CS, IDCS and Quark 6.5 and Acrobat with Pitstop. and thousands of fonts. New ones everytime I process a job.
The PC has Adobe CS and PS7 (my personal favorite) Flash, Swish, Dreamweaver, acro 6, FL Studio, ZBrush 2,
Bryce 5.5, Reason, XaraXtreme, Cakewalk Sonar, Painter 9, and C4D. with about 2G of Ram.

Being as fair as possible, I really have no preference as to platform, I find that the Mac is more prone to freezing and crashing than the PC. I prefer the Mac's filing system over NTFS. Neither is noticeably faster than the other. The Mac is quieter. It is also less tolerant of procedural errors. The G5 accepts right click commands and I have a Mac style GUI on the PC, so switching between platforms in pretty smooth.

Because I have a computer just for the internet, I don't require any security, either from Microsoft or 3rd party on my working PC. This makes a lot of difference I was also able to 'click off' many unrequired services, freeing memory.

I think that an optimized PC and Mac are pretty equal. Both have their pros and cons. It all boils down to cultism. I actually think that 'liberals' prefer PC, while 'conservatives' prefer Mac. ( I don't know about Catholics vs. Protestants or AFC vs. NFC )

Gaussian

Good solution Ron. [righton] I've also considered this, but since I already have 5 computers running in this household, I planned that once I have a new Conroe PC next year to run an emulated stripped down version of XP in a Vmware Desktop session. Vmware is an amazing piece of software and also much better than Microsoft's virtual PC and no, I'm not one of those Microsoft haters.

It's very fast in emulating other operating systems, even on old systems. You know, it's amazing to see an emulated XP session on an XP machine with beside it an emulated Linux Ubuntu session.
It's also great to test other operating systems or new software before you decide to install it. The complete emulated client is nothing but a single directory with 3 files or so, so it's also very easy to back up.

That it means that I will have to sacrifice some 200MB memory for this emulation is not so much of a problem for me, because in return I get something that is more secure than any Linux, Mac or PC system out there.

Still, this is not a solution for everybody, but I thought it was worth mentioning for those who want to try something difefrent.