[DByers]

So I returned from vacation to find a dead PC. The hard drive is done. Its been 3-1/2 years so I feel I should look into a whole new system. Instead of just going down the same old road I would like some opinions from people who really have used or are using a Mac. This is for home usage and we really do alot of picture downloading from the many cameras we have. Lots of video and movie making, we have 3 kids and family out of town so we burn alot of home movies to send off. Internet browsing and email all the time. No games on the system. Lots of music from i-tunes and CD's. My wife has an iPod and is looking at a video iPod in the near future.

looking at Intel® Core™ 2 E6420 Duo Processor(4MB L2 cache,2.13GHZ,1066FSB)
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 DIMMs
256MB nVidia GeForce 8600 GTS
500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
for a PC

&

2.16GHZ Intel core Duo Processor
2GB RAM
500GB Hard Dive
for the iMac in the 24" version

So real life experience with Macs and the plug and play they say is so easy would be nice. Pro's and cons with the Mac,s. I am not adverse to going Mac since I am not really a PC guy, its just whats been convienent.

Help me out a little.
TIA