New to mac - can buy cheap mini - advice?

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I can get my hands on a nice mac mini for under $100 and I have the parts to upgrade it to a Core2Duo 2.0GHz, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD, and the GeForce 9400M video.

Thing is... I've been a PC guy since DOS... making the switch will be hard! Any advice on what to expect - or if I even should?

Being a former frontline support guru for Apple, first, for that price, is this an intel or a PowerPC based mini? if it is PowerPC based (meaning it uses either a Motorola or IBM RISC CPU known as the G4), you are SOL.

Second, upgrading a mini is not for the faint of heart. The logic board is quite small, and, IIRC, the CPU is soldered Directly to the logic board. If the CPU is socketed, you need to find out which socket type was used.

Third, forget about upgrading the GPU. Mac Mini GPUs are soldered directly onto the logic board.

Fourth, depending on the age of this mini, you might not be able to install more than 4 gig of memory. Macs will boot from any device, internal, external, or over a network, as long as it can find a kernal and system folder that has been "blessed."

Fifth, when using Mac OS, everything is the reverse oh how you learned it in Windows. For example, if youhave an application open, closing the window when that application is running does not shut down the application. To shut down the application, you need to click on the application name, which is next to the apple menu in the upper left corner of the display, then choose quit.

Sixth, the Dock is your friend. Think of the Dock as the windows task bar on Steroids.

Seventh, the command line in Mac OS X is nothing like Windows command line. This is Unix, after all.

Finally, if you still need to run Windows, it can coexist with Mac OS X. You install windows using the Boot Camp application. Unfortunately, unless you have emulation software like VMWare Fusion, Parallels Desktop or Oracle's VirtualBox installed, you have to either 1) choose a new startup partition in the startup disk system preferences, or restart the computer and hold down the option key on your keyboard as soon as you hear the startup chime, and keep holding down the option key until you see a graphical menu that displays all the bootable media installed on this Mac. Use your keyboard arrow keys to select your boot camp partition, then press return. Windows will then start up.

You also might want to invest in a book like Mac OS X for Dummies.

One, you didn't notice I wrote all the specs above.

Two, I immediately upgraded it and sold it for twice what I paid for it.

It could be fun to design whole computer from scratch and opensource