Going from home PC to laptop

[spiralqueen]

Home PC is rather elderly and we think we'd prefer to have a laptop that we could use anywhere in the house rather than PC stuck in one of the bedrooms.

We currently have Windows but keep hearing good things about Macs in terms of useability and resistance to viruses. Is it worth paying the extra? And what happens about all the software and files that are currently on the PC - would they still be useable or is it a matter of starting again? As you can tell my knowledge is rather limited

Not sure what kind of set up we would need either. We do limited amount of work on the PC (we have MS Office installed), so mainly used for email, internet, storing photos and doing home accounts with MS Money. We're not gamers but might use it for viewing DVDs. We do a fair amount of printing though.

Help!

Yes, get a lovely Mac. They come with most of the software you'll need and they are easy to use. You can buy Microsoft Office for Mac and any Word/ Excel/ Powerpoint docs you have can just be transferred. The only thing I'm not sure about is an equivalent to MS money - anyone?

Think very carefully if you really need Office, it's not cheap and it's not particularly good (powerful yes but not well written).

Open Office is free and really rather good, you might find you don't need to but Office at all. Even if you don't get on with Open Office Apple has it's own software called iWork that's also very good and available for about £70 so a bit cheaper than Office.

As to other Software, well you might be able to find Mac versions.

You can install Windows on a Mac in a number of ways if there's a program that you really need to use. However that means shelling out for a copy of Windows and opens you up to the security nightmares that you're trying to avoid.

Gaming though is a problem, gaming on Macs really isn't very good at all and most stuff just isn't available.

There are beginning to be doubts about the future of OpenOffice following Oracle's takeover of Sun - my friend (who hopefully will still be working for Sun in a couple of week's time) thinks that one of the areas where Oracle may cut costs is in the support & development of OpenOffice - so future versions may be more liable to bugs.

We use Office at work so I'm assuming if I don't have Office loaded I wouldn't be able to do any work at home? Or would OpenOffice allow me to get round this?

You can open OpenOffice documents in the corresponding MS Office programs and vice versa.

In my experience OpenOffice sometimes has trouble opening up some documents with complicated formats. However I don't have the latest version.

OpenOffice is free so give it a go before sending any more money Microsoft's way.