Amarillo, Texas, solo Jeff Blackburn still rues the day last year when he traded in his Macintosh computers for PCs. In fact, he calls it the worst computer decision of his life. “From an economic point of view, I looked through the year-end checks and I had spent so much more money on consultants, network guys and crash repair men,” he says. “Believe me, it’s great to have software available, but who cares if it’s available if it doesn’t run. And we weren’t even doing anything fancy — we were running a Windows NT network.”

Blackburn recently replaced these PCs with a new iMac system of five computers and a server.