Not a techie paradise, but it can't be a Dick & Jane reader or the IT people won't visit.
Hmmm. I don't love BillG and M$'s monopolistic rapacity but let's not get lost here. Spam affects _all_ computers - the OS is irrelevant. Even in an all Mac world there would be spam. You can hardly blame Wintel for that or expect Gates to fix it.
".....I've built approximately 130 PC's" - how many Macs? (unless you had an Apple I)
It's easy to have system stability and no driver/BIOS/etc. problems if you are the only source for the OS and hardware and most of the software - in fact, you have no excuse not to!
And it's easy to have security when you have a UNIX based OS which has seen four major releases in three years all with added security patches. And OS 9 had plenty of security holes and opportunities for whoopsies since you were automatically at root level, even when working on a Word Document. Every single process in Mac OS 9 and earlier had root capability.
If there had been/were as many hackers targeting OS 9 (and below) then it would have been nearly as virus-beleaguered as Windows 9.x
XP is, in my experience, a very stable platform - I guess I've had two hard lockups in the last six months, both from tinkering at levels that ordinary user would not. Sure, you can wreck the OS if you try, but you can do this just as easily in OS X.
But I see Micro$oft as Full Government Control and very expensive at that which is why I am moving everything over to Linux. The Mac package is lovely, but still still costs too much.
What would I suggest for a complete beginner who could afford it and didn't want to have to learn anything? Perhaps indeed a Mac for the moment, but Linux is getting better and better (the new Suse 9 is superb) and in a couple of years.....
Mac - Linux User #302442
rm -rf /bin/laden/