I find this argument facinating, it's a point of view I've never heard before. Would you care to expand on your reasoning? Why does it make a difference where you are? Particularly in these days of broadband and e-commerce, I don't remember the last time I bought a piece of software in a shop so I don't see how it can make a difference.

I know you are George, hence "willing and able", there's only so many hours in the day!

those apps which must be compiled can be a pain it's true, but in general they now come with auto-configure scripts to sort things out for you.

I think what's holding Linux back at the moment is the difficulty inherant in making the average persons life easier without limiting the sheer power and control which is Linux's primary advantage over Windows for those of us willing and able to learn to use it.

sounds like you got a good deal there, and the 4GB of RAM was a superb move.

This is a very important consideration, for photography I'd say the monitor is your single most important purchase. If the machine is slow, it'll just take longer to get what you want. If the monitor is poor, it will be very hard to get correct colour and exposure.

I've been using Ubuntu for a while now, been totally MS free for nearly a year. It's very nice and fluffy, but I am currently seriously considering ditching it for Puppy linux.

Puppy is a tiny distro designed to run on anything you put it on from Pentium I upwards, and I believe it has been successfully installed on fast 486s. It is SERIOUSLY fast on modern hardware. It's far from being as pretty as Ubuntu, but if you aprieciate performance at the cost of looks it is a very serious contender.

In your position, I'd get the PC, wipe Vista and put Linux on it.

But that's just me.

Having never used OSX OR Vista I'm not going to comment on which OS is better, however, unless OSX is markedly more RAM efficient than Either Windows OR Ubuntu Linux the first thing you're going to want to do with that Mac is put another GB of RAM in it.

With your stated useage patterns (almost exclusively photography), the only spec which you will notice is the RAM. A quad core processor wont make a jot of difference to your life, either graphics card will be barely ticking over in 2D mode (at one point ATI had marginally better 2D image quality but I'm not sure if that's still true).

Don't forget it's possible to dual boot OSX and Vista on the new Macs, so if there's an option to stick an extra GB of RAM in the 2.4Ghz Duo Mac, that's probably your best option for flexibility, though it will obviously push the price up somewhat.

I hate to be hypercritical of what is a very lovely shot of a Blue Tit, but I find myself wishing the focus was on his face rather than his near side. These little guys are hard to catch though, so well done!

AHA, So THAT's why you were selling all that kit in the classified section!

very nice shot, lovely colours and the depth of field is just right.

I also have the Metz AF 48 (alright, my Dad has, but I pinch it ). We considered all options right up to the Pentax 540 and Metz 58 (which we rulled out for being too expensive although both are lovely units).

The Metz 48 won out because it's more powerful and has swivel vs the Pentax 360

Against the Sigma, the latter is more powerful but Sigma have a poor record for making things forward compatible with later models, and are largely known for lenses (and not always lenses of the highest quality at that). Metz are a flash company through and through, and the Metz 48 is USB upgradable so if it turns out to be incompatible with a later Pentax body, a simple firmware upgrade should solve the problem.