I have tried as best I can to become as device independent as possible. My NAS storage device holds all my pictures, historical documents, movies and music, backed up to a local store and Google. My second hand iPad really functions as social media hub, newspaper reader, and an all-day Evernote assistant. When it dies I'll probably look at something else, but I'm not tied to the device, nor am I passionate about it. Been in the cloud email/contacts for years with Gmail. Actually migrated all of my old Mail.app messages into Gmail several years ago, so no local mail I have to worry about.

I was able to snag a copy of Appleworks for Windows before I left Apple. I LOVED Macwrite.

David, I strongly concur. I was issued a Dell D620 Core 2 Duo 60GB HD running XP for grad school in Jun of 2007. Several months ago, I upgraded the RAM from 2GB to 4GB for maybe 60 bucks. Another 54 bucks bought me a 360 GB, 7200rpm HD. Two screws and the new HD fit in the sled. Installed Windows 7 Professional, recognized ALL hardware and downloaded ALL necessary drivers and patches. Admittedly subjective, but I'd say my 4 year old Win7 machine is just as reliable and a bit faster than a 2 year old 13" Macbook Pro, both with 4GB of RAM. I suspect the 7200rpm HD in the D620 laptop has quite a bit to do with it, however. But the bottom line is Win7 is boringly reliable and fast, and I will say Office on Windows is MUCH better than the Mac. I use Postbox for email on Windows, I like the social media integration and Thunderbird extensions to sync with Google's address book.