I've been familiarising myself with MacOS and various mac packages over the last few weeks (since taking possession of my first Mac just before Xmas). Having only briefly used macs whilst at college in the early 90's and spent the last 15 years using PCs (almost exclusively running Mr Gates' products), I can now see what all my mac using colleagues have been on about all this time.

It is absolutely brilliant! Yes, all Apple products look fantastic, except maybe those red and black iPods, but it just works so very well. As I've said, I'm new to Macs, but it's just all so intuitive, I have had no difficulties with it at all. Might have to admit my colleagues were right all along.

Ok, so it's weird not having all features in same software, especially the same keyboard short cuts (though they are very similar), and there are still a few packages that won't run on macs. But they ought to once I set my mac up with win xp - I know it seems daft, but it might save me lugging two laptops about with me.

Having been so impressed by the stability and speed of MacOS and every bit of software I've run so far, I'm a bit worried about the possibility that I might hobble my shiny new Mac, by letting Mr Gates' demons in.

I have downloaded Bootcamp (to see what's involved - and it seems pretty straight forward), and I will be requisitioning a copy of windows xp from work as soon as I found out who to ask. Has anyone else tried going down this route? If so any tales of woe before I go ahead?

My optimistic side sees this as the best solution - one machine running the two operating systems, the best of both worlds. My other side (not so much pessimistic as realistic) expects there to be problems.

Watch this space (which will hopefully be updated on a Mac).