I’m thinking of getting a new notebook computer. My current notebook is nearing the end of its lifecycle. It’s a two-year old Dell Latitude D610 with a 1.8 Ghz Pentium Centrino, 1 Gb RAM and an 80 Gb hard drive.

In many ways it’s still functional, just not necessarily up to the heavy beating of the daily commute I put it through. The ethernet port is dead, the inboard wireless card with the most up-to-date drivers won’t connect to some routers, the case is chipped, the touchpad is uncooperative, and the OS could probably use a complete wipe/rebuild at this point in the game.

I’ve looked at the PC options and there’s lots of decent notebook hardware available at decent price points. It all comes with Windows Vista now, and I’m really not all that interested in adopting the new Windows OS quite so early in the game – really not until its first service pack comes out.

What I’m really wanting, though, is a Mac Powerbook Pro running OSX and Parallels, so that I can import an image of my current PC as a virtual PC, and have all the graphic design, publishing, multimedia and writing tool advantages of the Mac.

The price point on MacBook Pros is pretty high, even with a rebate, and the market is very polarized – it’s hard to get an unbiased answer to “Is it worth it to invest in the dual system capability, as well as the Mac machine?” The Mac guys can come up with sets of figures that show you that the total cost of ownership is similar, and the PC guys come screaming in with all guns blazing, claiming of a completely skewed presentation.

Some of the hard-core geeks I respect most have recently made the switch, and have nothing but rave reviews for their new Mac. They love the performance, they are amazed by the reliability, and they are pleasantly surprised by the ease of use and intuitive interface for some of the day-to-day operational apps. They – and I – think it’s where the industry is going, and Microsoft is not making any substantive moves in similar directions.

Decisions, decisions – although not any I have an immediate deadline on.