.....how am I going to find it moving over?

Like seriously, I'm a complete noob!

I've got an external HDD on the PC (Windows XP) with a backup of all my photos and documents for example. Am I going to be able to plug this into the Mac and get everything off?

Any other tips? I will look through the software thread but what browser should I run? Is it worth running a Windows OS? Any day one essentials I need to know? Should I bother with iWork or one of the freebies?

Any tips and advice will be greatly appreciated as I'll be having "the chat" this evening which should lead to me placing an order!

OS X will read FAT and NTFS drives and will write to FAT drives, so no problems there.

With virtualisation software, like VMWare Fusion or Parallels, you could even virtualise your old machine and take it with you...

Generally, if you can use Windows, you won't have any problems with OS X, they are much the same to use, more so with Windows Vista and 7, but going from XP isn't a problem.

Apart from minor things, like the menu bar being at the top of the screen, instead of at the top of each windows and that you can only resize a window using the grabber at the bottom right of the window, as opposed to dragging whichever part of the windows happens to be convinient, there isn't much "new" to learn.

Office and OpenOffice are available, as are most other major applications, so you shouldn't have problems getting up and running, although there are often better tools than generic ones that are available on other platforms - Mac specific FTP programs and chat clients are better than generic ones like Filezilla or ICQ, MSN Messenger etc.

Cheers Dave

Anyone know if there's a way to connect my Xbox 360 (VGA) to the iMac's monitor?

What applications do you currently use on a regular basis?

Personally:
Adium - MSN/GTalk/IRC
Chrome - Nice with syncing, no need to copy bookmarks over, etc.
Mail - For email
*TextMate - Text editor, think Notepad++
LibreOffice - I use OpenOffice before that
Steam - for games
Cyberduck - FTP
Dropbox
GIMP - Image editing
Inkscape - Illustrator alternative
MagicPrefs - Extends Magic Mouse functionality
*MarsEdit - Blog writer
Onyx - A utility for running cleanup scripts, and stuff
Transmission - Torrents
VLC - Media that QT doesn't play

*I paid for this.

If you have anything on your PC that you use and you don't think my list covered, post back and others and myself will post back with possible replacements

Ben

I shall be keeping this list handy! Cheers.

The conversion needs to work the other way I think.

However I think the Mini DisplayPort is output only

Ahh yeah, you're right, it is the wrong way.

However, the same company do make other adaptors that will give the 27" iMac input from HDMI/DVI sources.
In fact, AFAIK, they're pretty much the only people who do at the moment.

My thought would be to use something like eyeTV to get the XBOX in there. Though I'm presuming games consoles don't use the trusty aerial socket anymore?

Typically HDMI or composite.

HDMI being preferred because it's HD. You really do not want to live with how bad a composite signal can make a fabulous picture appear on a fabulous screen.

There was a book called Switching to the Mac which I found very useful. It listed all the mac equivalent programs for anything on windows.