All of that and more is the reason why most of my friends have done the following:
Get a Mac with dual OS, then install XP. You can use all of your school/work things in Mac and keep the games in XP. That means that you never need both OS open at once.
That's what I'm gonna do as soon as the new Mac OS comes out. My parents have like seven licenses for XP, so that's not a problem, and the comp I'm gonna get is relatively cheap and very good (much better than my six year old one, which can run CnC3 and MEd 2 on medium to low settings, and DoW DC on medium to high settings).
Basically Microsoft is trying to milk evreyone for money. How? Make DX 10 Vista only, because that way you need to upgrade to their incredibly horrible OS to use any game, and make it incompatible with nearly all the old software.
At least apple tries to give you something good in exchange for their overpriced crap (and let's face it everything we buy anywhere is overpriced crap).
Every friend of mine who has done what I suggested thinks its great and love their Macs.
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