I'm about to give up on Microsoft Windows XP.

I've been holding off on buying a new computer because I really want a MacBook Pro. The problem is I won't save the money to be able to buy this computer for some time. Meanwhile, I'm losing minutes of quality time with my family with every task I attempt on my trusty old 933 mHz Dell Latitude C810 laptop. This laptop still runs Windows 2000 because I knew that XP would kill it. This machine is practically unusable when AVG Anti-virus Professional is running a full virus scan.

The machine that I run Windows XP on is my Blogging Workstation, a 1.3GHz tower PC with an AMD Athlon XP 2500+. It has two 17-inch SXGA (1280 x 1024) LCD displays. That's the machine to which I dock my iPhone.

iTunes really kills this machine. Whenever I'm syncing the iPhone, the CPU is pegged at 100%. I'm sure the iPhone takes a lot longer to sync on this machine than it would on many late model Macs.

I doubt that I am the only reluctant PC owner with an iPhone who has this problem. Having an iPhone when it was new was important enough for me to put off a new Mac purchase by a few months. However, I would never have believed how poor the performance of Windows XP on a 1.3GHz PC running iTunes would be until I experienced it myself. The collective weight of Microsoft Windows and the bloated applications that have been written for it are suffocating PCs with CPUs in the 1 Gigahertz neighborhood.

So, the laptop I want is out of reach. How will I solve this problem and improve my personal productivity? I'm going to buy myself a Mac mini-- the beefier of the two models-- as a replacement for the Blogging Workstation. Meanwhile I'll keep saving my money for the machine I really want.

I'm giving up the dual monitor configuration to do this. In fact, I'm staying with the old SXGA display to save money. I think the CPU speed and the more nimble OS X Leopard operating system will make a huge difference in my life.

The road to becoming a full-fledged Mac developer (again) will be long for me, but I have to start somewhere. I'm ordering my new Macintosh sometime around December 1.