[darkpuppet]

^^-- I hate to say this, but Anthony has a point. that would be your simplest answer, and for the occasional user such as yourself, you probably can't go wrong either.

If you have a lot of friends that share stuff with you, and they don't use macs, you may want to stick with a windows machine tho.

And for photography, and occasional use, you don't need THAT much of a computer anyways... I'm all about building my own, and i'll price and build you a machine if you're interested, or you can get a Dell. Like I said, I wouldn't recommend anything too crazy for you guys.

For $500, I built a 3GHZ intel machine with 1GB of ram, has firewire, USB2, optical digital outs, card reader, dual layer DVD burner, 150GB hdd, and winXP. All in a small form factor PC.

and you'd be able to get away with about the same... if you're looking for something that the wife can use for photography, save up your money for a really nice monitor. I think it's HP that just released an LED backlit LCD display, and the color accuracy and gamut smokes nearly any current LCD on the market. a 21" monitor costs about $6 grand tho.