Holy crap, I just bought that pc about a month ago! I was seriously considering a mac just because the OS looked more relaxing to use (and for iphone unification) but then I realized that I would be spending a little more money then a Windows PC that's twice as fast! Before I owned this PC I owned a Vista enabled amd2 dual core pc and I was getting tired of it. The pc always froze it was lagging up because I was filling up the 320gb HD limit and even with the 8800 geforce card was starting to showing it's limit with current gen games on medium settings. The Dell i7 I have now is awesome I use it all the time downloading tons of files while browsing and i've had ZERO freezes on me (Also thanks to Windows 7). The videocard is surprisingly good (supposedly a rebrand of the 9800 series) and can even keep up with the latest games. The only game I can't run on max settings is Crysis on very high. I'm a very demanding pc user and I'm very surprised that this is keeping up with my daily habits! The best thing about using this pc on the first day is how it had no spam trial software from what I remember and Dell is supposedly the worst company that abuses them with new desktop pcs. My guess is that it's because they don't spam you with their gaming pc linups
I'd agree if you can front for a Macbook Pro, it's a great machine for what you seem to want to do and you can play PC games in windows on it relatively easily... It really depends why you want it I guess and what you intend to do with it For me it was more of a nescessity as I develop for the iPhone. If your a gamer and just want something to play games on and used for photoshop then the PC option would be a better choice as you get more bang for your buck for gaming. And photo editing is not much of a problem (of course that depends on your physical ram quite a lot). Plus you get a laptop to use at college for your notes and messing about on when your bored
