Thinking of switching to a apple mac
 

I am thinking of getting a new laptop and with vista being unusable I am thinking maybe it time to make the switch to an Apple Mac...
I have a few questions to those of you that have made the switch...

1) can I still access files stored on other PC's on our office network. The file system of the drives is NTFS and the computers are running XP and are networked through TCP/IP.
2) The programs I use most often are, Excell, Word, TextPad, Trillian, Outlook Express, FireFox, IE, ACDC, FTP, QuickBooks, Quicken.... Does the mac have programs that will do these tasks...
3) Can a mac open up files saved / created on a pc, such as excell files, txt files, word docs etc...


Any help would be great...

1) The file system doesn't matter, you'd access them as Windows shares, which is available in Mac OS X.
2) I use Office 2008 for Mac, which covers Word, Excel etc. As for instant messaging on multiple networks I run Skype and AdiumX (ICQ/MSN/Yahoo/AIM). Mail.app (the OS X mail application) could replace Outlook Express depending on how you use it. Firefox is available, and so are some good FTP apps such as Transmit. Quicken Mac 2007 is available as well as QuickBooks Pro 2007 for Mac. In any event I would suggest making sure you get a laptop with a good amount of RAM (2GB+) so that you can run VMware Fusion with Windows XP to run Mac apps alongside any Windows apps that do not have Mac versions.
3) Yes. The only exception is the wacky Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx) for which Microsoft offers a conversion tool to download.

thanks for the info.

Or you could use Nero Office/Open office for free and it does all that including the new wacky files.

Looks like the only software we are going to have issues with is QuickBooks Pro 2008, however not a big deal....

We run Quickbooks 2007 on our Mac with no problems

I am wandering the same thought forest

Software wise, it's fairly compatible. I'm not really happy with the FTP client offerings on Mac though. Transmit and Cyberduck are the best I have tried and they both suck compared to PC offerings. Office documents will be fine. For local drives Macs can read NTFS but not write to them. However there are free open source plugins to enable write support for NTFS. Accessing through the network will probably work fine for write but I haven't tried it.

For photo work I prefer PC, development I like Mac.