"...Its fun and easy to use but be prepared to flaff about with things like printer drivers et al. Regardless what the the fanboyz say its not as straight forward as Windows..."
Not so many problems on the printer front, my printer(s) are attached to my old Windows XP tower and I use
Google Cloud Print when I need to print something from one of my laptops, if I had a 'cloud ready' printer I wouldn't even need the XP tower.
Scanners I thought would be more of a problem, especially as Apple machines tend to have very poor scanner support, however to my surprise my version of Ubuntu had support for my Canon scanner built in from the get go.
Microsoft Office, do you need it? Some folks probably do, many only think they do. The iPad seemed to do rather well without a version of MS office. Do you really need all these features? Or does your employer think you do?
I dislike Open/Libra office and manage to work with Word and Excel documents using '
Google Drive' and as those documents are being sent back and forth between myself and some fairly large architectural, legal and construction firms and no one has yet left out a lift shaft or building floor or short changed me, it must work.
Day to day I use the Chrome browser, Google Picasa for photo management and minor photo editing tasks, the default .txt editors on whichever OS I am using for writing documents/todo lists and notes.
I like the fact that Chrome syncs my bookmarks, preferences and extensions between computers and that I can customise it so that it ignores most of the internet's annoying or intrusive features. I use it for shopping, reading the news and looking at BCUK.
I really do not need word, all those options just get in the way actually writing. A plaintext file allows me to just write, if I want to format it and add pics or something I can cut and paste it into a Google Drive document afterwards.
Apple's Microsoft Office equivalents 'Pages' and 'Numbers' are very pretty but laughably crap, they will back themselves up to Apple's cloud storage but I cannot edit them there! Although Apple have said that I will be able to buy the next operating system to be able to do so!
My father in law has both a Vista and Windows 7 machine and while the Vista unit is quite terrible, Windows 7 seems to be the bees knees, I especially like the built in XP emulation. He is also really into his photography and has a copy of Adobe Photoshop in which I have seen him use no more than three tools (and those not terribly well) so maybe he should have saved the money for a better lens or something else.
The version of Ubuntu I linked to above (and the current versions) can be run from the CD rather than installed if you want to take it for a spin before committing.
I'm hoping the OP finds these asides into Windows/Ubuntu useful and does not consider them to be thread hijack.
