Well I've not used anything before Tiger, but yeah, they supposedly have got faster each time. Obviously you can get little updates (like in Windows), but the major revisions (E.g. from Panther to Tiger) you have to pay for, in the same way you have to pay to go from Win 98 > 2000 > XP > Vista etc. Sorry Nick, I kinda started that as a bit of a Joke that backfired Of course. You can get MS Office for Mac anyway, it gets really good reviews. A lot of (Mac-loving) people will tell you that it's better on the Mac than on the PC. I dunno about that, I've never used it. So obviously that uses the same file types as the PC version. Then there's OpenOffice.org which works fine also and you can save to .docs etc. Pages (Apple's own word processing thing) can read .docs but it can't (or won't ) save as .docs. I use Pages because it's easy and quick and simple, just what I need for taking notes and stuff. If I need office compatibility I use OOo