We're not suggesting that you should stop using your PC and join the Mac fraternity, which, it ought to be said at the outset, constitutes a mere 2 per cent of the personal computing community. From time to time, we've had the impression, from the sheer volume of email whenever we've said anything at all negative about Apple, that they outnumber Windows users by about five to one. We shudder to think what our inbox would be like if Apple's sales increased substantially.

What we're advocating instead is that if you're still using Windows 98, or, God help you, Windows ME or Windows 95, that you upgrade to Windows XP immediately. And if you've already got Windows XP and you are interested in digital music, particularly if you're one of many thousands of people who've bought an iPod or you've got a digital still or movie camera, that you consider switching between a PC and a Mac - whatever the effect that might have on our email.

For that matter, even if you'd just like to escape all those viruses and other security risks of internet browsing and email, think about being kind to yourself in 2005 and use the Mac as your interface to the world.

What we mean by all this is that you should continue to use your Windows computer and all those programs you've invested in over the years for which there's no Macintosh alternative. But give yourself the treat of using a Mac, which is unrivalled for its ease of use, its infinitely better security, and its package of free programs. They include the iLife suite - iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD and iTunes - which makes the creation, management and editing of digital content so much easier than anything we've found for Windows. (Yes, we know you can get a Windows version of iTunes, but the Mac version works much faster with your iPod.)

The Mac also gives you free use of programs such as iCal and iSync, which make it so much easier to create and share calendars and To Do lists with PDAs and laptops. And if you've got a .Mac account, their availability on the web is a breeze.

The announcement of Apple's new "headless" Mac, the Mac Mini, makes it much more affordable to do that, although it's by no means the best solution if you're considering abandoning Windows and embracing the Macintosh. For that, you'd be far better with one of the range of iMacs or G5 Macs.

But we think the price of this new Mac makes it an ideal second PC. A mere $799 gets you the entry-level Mac mini. It's got a 1.25 MHz G4 processor, 256 MB of RAM, and is "headless" and "fingerless", in that it doesn't have either a keyboard or mouse. But with a KVM switch, you can share the PC's screen, keyboard and mouse. In our opinion, that's a reasonable price to pay for the elegance and functionality of OS X, which is essentially a graphical user interface to Unix - albeit a greatly enhanced version of Unix - and for all those applications and the FireWire 400 bus.

You can pay extra for a more powerful version, and for a DVD super drive, but we'd suggest you think twice about doing that. You might find, a few months after you've started using the Mac, that you really would prefer to use it for everything, so the extra expense might be put to better use.

By that time, we will probably have had the release of Tiger, the enhanced version of Mac OS X - already the best PC operating system by far, in our opinion, and soon to be even better.

At the same event where Jobs announced the Mac mini, he gave a preview of some of Tiger's 200 new or enhanced features, including the improved Spotlight search engine technology, "smart" folders and email inboxes that will search for content that belongs in them, and better support for Samba file sharing, which will give you improved access to your Mac home directory from any Windows computer on your network. It's already much easier to bring up a Windows directory on your Mac than vice versa.

Bleeding Edge is quite happy using both Windows and the Mac, although we had to pay several thousand dollars a few years ago for a G4 to do that. At this price, the sheer joy of making your second computer a Mac seems to us irresistible. Even if the next time we say something less than complimentary about a Mac or Apple - which, let's face it, isn't perfect - our inbox completely fills up.