Hi, I'm a life long Mac user whom has really started to get irritated with Mac's price locks and their blocking their products from interfacing with others. I've been working from my iBook for over two years now and I just need a more powerful computer for what I use this for. I'd like an intel, but it's just way out of my price range, so I'm considering purchasing a PC with that kind of power, and converting it. I'm a very capable person with the ability to troubleshoot and educate myself, but the main reason I use Macs is because I don't have to mess around with the hardware and operating systems, so I want to make a purchase that will give me as much, in one shot, as I possibly need to do this, so that as few hardware modifications as possible are needed. At the same time, cost is the reason I'm considering this, so I'd like to find the best buy as well.

I'd like at least 2GB or more RAM and it would be nice to be able to use firewire for my external harddrives.

Well, i found that by using a older form of Linux, i was able to convert a hard drive to mac format. i believe i used the Gpartition Editor in Ubuntu 7.10 live CD.

by doing this i installed mac OSX onto it and was able to run it on my PC. of course tweaking everything afterward was a lengthy process. but hey, if you want it to run OSX. that's needed as it was not intended to originally do so. and also, you can probably get a USB/ Firewire PCI card relatively cheaply, if not onboard your PC already.