New Laptop – MacBook Pro?

Pretty soon I’m going to be looking for a new laptop. Currently I’m using an ancient Dell Inspiron 5100. It’s about 3 years old, and I’ve replaced the motherboard, upgraded the video card (to an ATI Radeon Mobility 9000), and upgraded the hard drive (to 80GB 5,400RPM). Really the only thing left that can be upgraded is the memory which is currently 2x256MB PC2100 with a max of 2x1GB PC2700. I’m thinking it’s really not worth upgrading anymore and that I’d rather have a shiny new MacBook Pro. Why the switch from Windows to OS X? Basically I’m sick of having to worry about spyware and viruses. I’m extremely security conscious, so I very rarely get any of that junk, but I’d still just like to not even have to think about it – outside of work of course. A large part of my job involves removing spyware and viruses from customers computers, which gets really boring and tedious after years of doing it. It also shows me how a Windows box really can be trashed pretty easily. Plus I’ve never really used a Mac. I’d like to have some hands on experience with them. I’m thinking about getting a 17″ MacBook Pro. The earliest I would be buying, baring any unforeseen events, is the first of the year. So I’m hoping the new Intel Core 2 Duo processors will be reasonably priced by then. I do video editing, web development, network administration/engineering, and a lot of computer security research. That means I’m going to want a pretty beefy machine. The MacBook I priced out the other day came out to about $3,000.00 USD (after the educational discount…). One of the reasons I was hesitant about the MacBook was that I’d read that they get pretty hot really quick. This may or may not be true, however I just read a digg story (digg it) that eases my worries. If anyone has any feedback on this I’d be happy to hear from you. Either post a comment on this article, email me, or try to catch me on AIM while I’m not playing World of Warcraft.