Switching BACK from a Mac to a PC: I know, I'm not cool. Help me anyway?

Your plan looks entirely reasonable to me. We have almost the same needs for our laptop and just recently bought a replacement for an older netbook. 2. A couple of months ago, I would have told you to look at AVG free. I'd used it for years without a problem. Now, I would seriously consider Microsoft Security Essentials---MSE. I've got it on our new netbook (below) and it's entirely painless. It's a combo of an anti-virus and an anti-malware (trojans, spyware, etc...) monitor. With the windows firewall enabled, it appears to be comprehensive, unobtrusive, easy to use and free. It appears to be an excellent solution to most of window's security problems. If it works, and it appears to, MSE should replace almost all of the security products mentioned so far (AVG, Spybot search&destroy, hijackthis! etc...) 3. We just bought a Samsung NC10 to fit almost exactly the same set of needs you have. It's much, much better than the Del Mini9 that it replaced; faster, much better screen, much, much better keyboard. If you want a netbook, that's one I'd recommend. It will run a browser (Firefox), Office and such just fine. We don't use iTunes, so can't comment there. All (almost all? 95%+ anyway) the netbooks out there are being offered with Windows XP (Home). I haven't seen any with windows 7 yet. 4. We spent $350 (CDN) on the Samsung. That should leave enough to buy a larger screen. Do try the netbooks before you buy, if at all possible. The Samsung has one of the nicest keyboards of the lot, but there's no way I'd put it in the same category as my work-provided Thinkpad however. the prices of these things can't be beat, but be sure you can live with the compromises of the form factor. If you can't, Dell and others offer full-sized laptops just above your upper price limit new, and often under $500 on sale or refurbished.

I have had two different computer experiences that are germane to this discussion. 1: For about 4 months, I used an Acer Aspire 1 netbook. After the initial thrill of its size and portability wore off, I quickly grew to detest its tiny, cramped keyboard, cheap, oversensitive touch pad, flimsiness, lack of disk drive and instability (despite running XP, rather than Vista, it crashed frequently). Within just a few months, the battery also didn't last much longer than 45 minutes. To me, the lesson there was that you get what you pay for in the sub-$500 laptop realm. I replaced it with a regular-sized Dell Studio, for which I paid extra for XP, and couldn't be happier. Still have the Acer, have been meaning to craigslist it. 2: A couple years ago, I had an old Toshiba laptop on which I installed Ubuntu just to check out. I liked the look, and the rebellion of not using Microsoft appealed to me, but I was frustrated by the compatibility issues with work/school computers and our fleet of iPods. I kind of liked Open Office, and ran it on Windows computers for a while, but when my wife had to buy a copy of MS Office for her work, I was lured by the potential for saving files and reopening them on another computer in Word without weird formatting and other issues. I don't use Open Office anymore. This computer's wireless chip/thing eventually died, and I junked it. Finally, with regard to viruses, I run the free versions of AVG and Ad Aware, as well as Spybot S&D, and between the three of them, have had pretty decent luck over the years preventing viruses on our home computers.

Open office is NOT a replacement for word. You are an editor. You need MS Word. Simply no other way around it. People that suggest otherwise clearly do not collaborate or share manuscripts. That said, scody, go ahead and get a netbook that feels comfortable to you. First go to a store like bestbuy (yes, I cringe saying this) but get a feel for which one you feel comfortable using. You don't have to buy it there. Then get one with plenty of RAM and a big enough harddrive. Install word and itunes and you will be set. For music: No conversion needed. If you want all the music on the new laptop, set itunes to consolidate music from the preferences. Then drag all the files onto itunes are you'll be set. For being protected against viruses: Install AVG, zone alarm, Spyware search and destroy (all free) and that's it. Use Firefox (at the very least install ad-block as an addon). happy transition.

For Question 2.. the answer is http://www.eset.com/. Wikipedia says: * NOD32 was certified by ICSA Labs. * It has been tested 54 times by Virus Bulletin with a success rate of 96%, the highest pass rate of the tested anti-virus products. * It was rated 5 stars out of 6 by PC Pro Magazine and received their "recommended" award. * At CNet.com it has received a score of 4.5/5 by editors * 94.4% Malware Detection and 94.7% spyware detection in the latest AV-Test comparative * 93% Detection on Set A and 96.6% Detection on Set B with most aggressive settings in the latest AV-Comparatives Test On top of all that.. its fairly light on system resources and downloads updates inconspicuously. It's not free (like AVG).. but then, you get what you pay for.

Open office is NOT a replacement for word. You are an editor. You need MS Word. Simply no other way around it. People that suggest otherwise clearly do not collaborate or share manuscripts. Just a note that I do, in fact, both collaborate and share manuscripts, which is why I wanted to tease out a distinction between being able to view, edit, and save .docx or .doc word documents (which is all that most users, even many who work collaboratively, need, and which openoffice.org handles fine) and actually needing MS Word2007 for Windows (almost always because of styles), which sounds like is the case for scody; ditto on being able to sync an iPod and listen to music vs. needing to use iTunes, the program, specifically. Anyway, M.C. Lo-Carb!'s experience on openoffice isn't the norm anymore--I move my novel from openoffice to Word all the time, and used to use openoffice to edit my student's poems (so weird formatting out the wazoo) and the only difference is the font. Anyway. scody, something that hasn't been covered regarding potentially getting a netbook is that you won't have an optical (dvd or cd) drive with most (all?) netbooks. While this isn't a major concern, it can be frustrating if it's going to be your only computer, and can make things difficult if you ever need to, say, reformat your hard drive. Because of that, and your size concerns, I'd probably look into a full-size notebook instead. They're cheap enough now that you should be able to get something okay within your price range.

Most of your questions have been answered, but I wanted to suggest http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/ for your antivirus needs. I've been using it for a while, and it works well. Integrates nicely with Windows, for what that's worth.

When I'm editing at home, I don't want to have to rethink a single thing from the experience of editing at my office -- it has to be identical. If using Word is indeed an absolute requirement, and Macs don't suit you, then you are indeed locked into using Windows at home. If the absolute requirement is that work and home machines must behave the same way when working with any given document, your best bet is to make sure you're using identical versions of Microsoft Office on both. Second-best bet would be to install the http://www.go-oo.org/ on your work machine (it's available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix, and is the version that most of the Linux distributions ship by default) and use OpenOffice.org Writer at both ends, which gives you a choice of OS at home instead of locking you in to Windows. If I were editing (as opposed to typesetting) books for a living, I'd actually prefer working with OOo Writer to Word, becauseI'd be more confident that it wouldn't crash, burn and die and take my long document with itI like its styling features better than Word's: it doesn't, for example, want to clutter up my styles list by auto-creating entries like like "Body text + bold" whenever I happen to boldface a piece of body text; also, styles can be created for page and section formats as well as for character and paragraph formats, which is neatthe user interface for headers and footers is not completely barking insanethe overall look and feel is a lot closer to that of Word 2003, which I've always felt comfortable using, than to Word 2007, which I loathe and detestBut I'm not doing that; what I do for a living is fix malware-infested Windows boxes, which has naturally given me a somewhat jaded view of the suitability of that product as a base for any kind of productivity :-)

1. This has been pretty well answered. Shouldn't be a problem. If you have a lot of iTunes music store files with DRM, you're probably stuck using iTunes for Windows, but that's not the worst fate of all time. 2. There's no reason to pay for your home antivirus software. Avast! is good and mostly unobtrusive (though it will talk to you unless you tell it to stop). AVG is free, but increasingly nags you to try the pro version. Avira AntiVir is also free and is the current hip choice for free A/V; I only just started using it on my in-laws' computer (mine has Avast, FWIW), but have had a pretty positive experience so far. FWIW, AntiVir gets the best reviews in recent free AV comparison tests. 3. Unless we're talking about a very potent netbook here, for a primary computer, a netbook isn't powerful enough, IMHO. You'd be better served with larger notebook, especially once iTunes and Firefox start devouring your RAM in voracious gulps. If you're looking for something MacBook-sized or smaller, you're looking at 13" and 12" models (the MacBook is 13.3"). The catch is that those tend to cost more than 14" and 15" models, so it might be worth thinking about how much super portability is worth to you. Also, keyboard and mouse will be USB (unless wireless, then probably Bluetooth, in which case, make sure you have bluetooth on the new machine), so no problem. Monitor, on the other hand, can be a smidge tricky. Not all netbooks/notebooks will have a port for an external monitor, so make sure it's there. If you can afford a notebook with an Intel Core2Duo processor, I recommend doing so. Intel dual core would be the next in line, followed by Celeron, Athlon X2, et al. If you are absolutely sold on a netbook, get one with an Intel Atom processor with the largest number you can find (I believe 1.6 MHz is pretty common and pretty solid). 4. This will be a little time-consuming, but not impossible. Depending on how much time you have to get this done, I'd suggest popping into a BestBuy/Staples/OfficeMax/whatev and seeing which sizes and form factors appeal to you, have the things you need (monitor out, maybe bluetooth, CD/DVD reader/writer, etc.). Then, spend a week or so just following the RSS feeds of sites like http://www.techbargains.com/ and keeping an eye on which computers meeting your requirements have coupons, rebates, etc. If you have time to wait for them, deals will come up that will allow you to get more computer for your budget. 5. You probably (by which I mean definitely) don't want Windows Vista; you want Windows 7 or--if we're talking netbook here, Windows XP. If you do decide on a netbook, an optical drive (CD/DVD) is an easy external (USB) addition, and not super expensive. You'll probably end up leaving it at home. Good luck! Finding the right computer at the right price is frustrating. The big box stores all have store-specific model numbers, to thwart price comparison.

Thanks for the link to MSE, andrew - will certainly be investigating that product. AVG 7 and 7.5 were both more than good enough, but 8.5 needs a lot of things turned off to reduce its in-your-face factor to an acceptable annoyance baseline.