I just had a birthday in December and this was a particularly good birthday. My wonderful husband bought me an Apple G5 computer. I got the 1.6 GHz model with the video card upgraded to the ATI 9600 Pro. This is THE most beautiful computer I have ever seen. All year I had been thinking about buying a new computer since the only one that I have is my work laptop so I am very limited to what I can do and download on it. A couple of years ago I bought Ray an iBook for a wedding gift (how geeky is that!) but being the geek that he is I have not been able to pry it out of his hands since then. So, on my birthday I got a great surprise. Having never really used a Mac before, I have to say that the user interface is really straight forward and easy to learn, beside being really pretty. The speed of this computer is so fast that it puts my laptop to shame and I no longer long to be able to click away and open multiple windows at the same time without my computer hanging. If anyone is thinking of buying a new computer, I highly recommend a Mac and I'm sure that anyone would be impressed with speed of the G5.
Now, the only problem with getting this new computer is that now I need a new monitor to go along with it. I'm currently using an old CRT monitor that is about 10 years old. It used to be white.....Luckily enough, I just found out that I am getting a bonus at work so I am thinking of spending the money on the monitor. I went around to a few stores today looking at the different monitors. I started out at Canadian Computer in Oakville to look at the Apple monitors. Although they are very nice looking, they are quite expensive and they are ADC so they will only work with Apple computers. Although this isn't really an issue for now, I don't think I like the limitation. While I was there though, I found out that the Apple monitors are basically Samsung monitors. With that in mind I hit Futureshop and Best Buy looking for Samsung DVI monitors. Futureshop only had crappy ones from manufacturers that I had never heard of and Best Buy doesn't really carry DVI monitors. Needless to say I came home without a monitor and very sad. Later on Ray and I did a bit of searching on Samsung's website and found the following monitor....very nice! Since Ray is going to PC Canada on Monday and they carry them, he is going to see if he can take a look at one. I think I am going to order one though.