Larry L wrote:
wrote


I'd recommend solving your problem by buying a good used laptop running
XP.



Since I posted earlier today I found a 'refurbished' one at Dell with a 1
year warranty and more than enough power ( AMD dual-core 1.8ghz, 1gig ram,
fast vid card, onboard WiFi etc ) for my modest needs ... $446.00 to my
door



One reason I wanted to avoid Vista is because I DO have several older
programs I want to run ... and a couple oddball things like Apache, PHP and
MySql, too I KNOW they all work fine on XP, have them on several
different machines, but I'm not looking for a hassle trying to get it all
running on an unknown ( to me ) OS

If you'd bought an Intel-based Mac (it would be more than $446) you'd be
able to run XP AND Vista, in addition to OS X, which is superior to both
of them.

Bundled software (Boot Camp) lets you boot into any of those OS. You
could also run Linux, and probably some other OS I'm not aware of.

With third-party virtualization software (Parallels or VMware Fusion)
you'd be able to run all of them at the same time.

--
Cut "to the chase" for my email address.