Mac or PC

[Tellos Athenaios]

Buy something without an OS (or if you must buy something with the OS of your choice) then configure it to be either a multi boot system or use a virtual machine. That way you can have the best of n (up to 3 in case of multi boot) worlds.

For all 'serious' stuff I use Ubuntu nowadays, mainly because it runs so much faster than Windows -- not insisting on gazillions of background processes I have no clue what they do, yet whenever I close something running on my name causing a Blue Screen of Death. And come to think of it, it's almost easier to work with than Windows too -- mainly because a lot of stuff can be directly run/killed from a commandline without much trouble.

@Fragony: dunno, but you could of course -- just remove all the components. If it's Unix it doesn't have such nonsense as registry meaning... locate it and use rm to remove it.

[Banquo's Ghost]

Anyone know of any good free cleaner for the mac? Safari is acting a bit strange, lots of 'can't display' nonsense.

I'm unsure what you mean by a "cleaner"?

Before trying to fix Safari, I would go to Disk Utility (Applications folder; Utilities) and select your hard disk under the First Aid tab. Click on Repair Disk Permissions. This just cleans up any unconnected rubbish and is a good bit of regular housekeeping.

If Safari still plays up, there are two possible issues. You might simply not have the right plug-in - Safari doesn't run certain video MIME formats, and reports a "can't display this content" type message. Easy way round this is to use Firefox or Opera instead. It may be a Windows Media Player issue - MS refused to make a WMA 10 for the Mac, so some content won't play whatever. You can get a workaround from Flip4Mac.

If it's not a content issue, then it's best just to reset Safari. Go to the menu bar, select Safari (next to the apple) and choose Reset Safari. This will clear everything (you can choose what to keep) that might cause a conflict like cookies etc.

Hope this helps.

Oh, and its very unlikely (unless you are using a Boot Camp partition) but it is possible in theory to get a virus on a Mac. Just to be safe, I'd recommend the free ClamAV to check any MS Word and suchlike files.

[Fragony]

Tried it with safari same thing, I think it has to do with my connection, doesn't happen on wifi only with my mobile connection, it's awesome to be able to check e-mail wherever you are but it sometimes is a bit on the slow side.

[LordKhaine]

Desktop triple boots Windows XP/FreeBSD/Ubuntu. XP for games, FreeBSD for getting knee deep into command line and countless text files... and Ubuntu for everything else.

And my laptop runs Ubuntu.