well for a novice user, a mac is alright. I don't like them personally because if you do know what you are doing, the lack of ability to change how the interface works is very difficult compared to windows where I can do many changes in seconds. Also the lies in their marketing campaign and the self righteous cult they spawn irritates me.
In my opinion Macs are to PCs as a boom box is to a home theater reciever. The boom box is easy to use, set up but has few options to modify it's output and is not expandable it does the most common audio tasks only and does them well. A home theater is more complex requires a little tinkering but is adaptable to almost all sound situations, for the true audiophile the two cannot be compared, however to someone who just wants to listen to a cd the hometheater may be too much effort.
I'm not a fan of Dell, though they make a decent machine they are underpowered for what you are paying. HP was a good name, though I had several issues with drivers being pushed via their updater that didn't work and I'd have to keep clicking cancel.
I thought that my laptop was running slower than it should with Vista so I installed XP onto it and didn't notice much of a change in speed, though I enjoyed not having to deal with the crap that HP puts on their machines (HP security agent, HP Button Manager, HP Update Manager, HP Speed Optimizer, HP Kitchen sink in memory) though unless you install your OS from scratch instead of using the recovery CDs it doesn't matter what vender you buy from as they all add their own crap that clogs up memory.
vista is suffering from the same problem as XP when it was released, people are running it on machines not powerful enough to run it, and venders are pushing buggy drivers and buggy 3rd party software onto it requiring even more power to run well. in a year when hardware catches up with the new demand and programmers figure out Vistas behaviour you'll see vista take off.
UAC is annoying and you can turn it off, you can also change the warning level down so it only asks at high risk actions instead of all actions which is what I do. I like this better than Unix/Linux/Mac OS variants because in those you have to SU into the administrative role while Vista asks if you want to do whatever you've asked it to do, then temporarilly puts you into the admin position then removes you when the task is complete automatically. While it's annoying because this wasn't in other versions of windows, it is elegant compared to how other OS achieve the same thing.
If you need computer work done, try to find a friend who's good at it and will trade something for their services (money, beer, chores whatever) just don't expect them to do it for nothing. And don't blame them if your computer gets all crudded up within a month afterwards if you install every toolbar, freeware crap and filesharing program that comes your way. You don't need a smiley tool bar etc, those things are usually spyware in disguise.
Don't use any of the geek services in any of the big box stores, most of them have no certifications and are charging outlandish rates. ie 80 bucks for a spyware fix - they install one of the free utilities, clean your system up, remove the utility then charge you 80 dollars. you could have bought a top of the line computer security suite for less and would keep you from being reinfected in the future.
If you don't have anti virus/spyware installed I advise you to get AVG Free. It's free for private use and it's updated daily. It's what I use, I even paid the 29 dollars to upgrade to the proffesional version. Well worth it in my opinion.
I recommend not buying a laptop from Canex, not because they are bad machines, but because Canex does not have the infrastructure to support you after you purchase and will refer you to the manufacturer which expects you to take the laptop to the vender if there is a problem in the first 30 days.
, and I'll do it for 450 and won't play games while I'm doing it ;D
