If the costs come close, get the one you like. Simple as that!
I didn't realize you could get away with buying regular PC components for upgrades. I always thought apple forced proprietary hardware on people. That's good to know and a point in apples favour.
I will disagree with you Ron though, on the headaches with the OS. The people that have problems are typically the ones that don't know to use an anti-virus program or just plain old common sense. Or, they're the ones that try to put the latest OS on last decades hardware. I've run Win95,98se,XP,Vista and now 7 and have never had problems that weren't of my own creation.
Apples security "edge" is because it's typically not worth the time for hackers to write viruses for when there are 100x as many PC's to target as there are Mac's. Not because it's a more secure OS. The comparison I would use is a nice mercedes sitting beside an old beater. The mercedes is 10x as likely to have the window smashed and the glovebox looted through, while you could leave the doors unlocked on the beater and no-one would touch it... doesn't make the beater more secure.
Back to Doug:
If you are photo editing, after the processor the 2 things that are CRITICAL are hard drive space and RAM. The average size of even my JPEG's is about 10mb each (saving in highest quality) and my raw files are about 15mb.
4GB's of RAM on a win7 equipped PC is lots, that's what I have on my desktop. More is better but 4 is just fine.
A 500 gig hard drive should do you for a while! I've got 750 and sometimes think about just putting stuff on there so it doesn't look so empty
