Spinning on that dizzy edge

Yeah, what to do. You know I would never-NEVER-talk you out of a mac(unless it involved the word 'air') so that's my take on that. However, since the pc is your comfort zone, i can tell you that the Toshiba mentioned above has gotten good reviews. IBM/Lenovo are definitely tanks as far as laptops go, but if you're gonna pay that much, get a mac. I can't comment on the Compaq/HP yet...
We can get XP on a pc for you, the Dells you get from the company-(not the crap ones made for Wal-mart, the real ones)-are coming to us with both XP and Vista disks now. The real problem with Vista is/was that most existing pc's couldn't carry it and it didn't support anybody's hardware. It basically meant you had to get all new stuff like printers. So again, if you're going to have the same type of interface and make sure you have the special drivers, you might as well get a mac. The upside of Vista capable pc's is that they barely notice the XP operating system they're so amped-up to carry Vista.
So i guess to summarize, if you get a pc your dear hubby and i can make it fly between his skills and my stuff connections, but Vista isn't really that far from OS X from what i remember so you might do just as well to get a mac.
I say its time to go do some in-the-store hands-on playtime! The most important part of any laptop is whether or not it fits you.