ALSO.... I don't seem to do that much Photoshop so I wonder if I should just go with a lower powered Mac but I worry that I'll regret it in the future.
Unsure. Thoughts?
I read the whole post, I promise, I'm just quoting what I'm responding to specifically. : )
I haven't done research in awhile, but I think you can get a decently cheap PC that meets all of your specifications and needs. Do you plan on buying a retail box or would you like to get something custom? There are places that will assemble and test whatever combination you'd like (tigerdirect.com, newegg.com, etc) and some of them come with a decent warranty- the tradeoff being that your local geek squad or what have you will probably not be willing to dig around in a custom machine to fix problems, at least not without charging you a lot, so if you want to have it fixed you'll have to mail it back and wait for them to fix it and send it back.
I personally had a lot of luck with my local Fry's Electronics. The guy hooked me up with a warranty that would cover the replacement of the motherboard/cpu no matter what I had done to it. He recommended I steadily overclock it bit by bit until it fried and then take it to get replaced and know exactly how far I can overclock without danger... which is wayyyy more hardcore than I wanted to be. But when it wouldn't start one week I took it in and they fixed it for free, no questions asked, since I'd bought it there.
As far as the photoshop thing, I'm currently on an ancient PC. I can't really make out the ancient people who crafted it by reading the hieroglyphics on the side, but I know that it's a pentium 4 2.8 ghz (current retail value about 60-70 bucks), and it runs photoshop without a single glitch. Even when I'm doing massive vector drawings. Illustrator, on the other hand, tends to choke it like a red-headed stepchild who stepped over the line one too many times with his boy band music at three in the morning.
As far as the mac goes... I'll pretend I didn't see the first half of this post and keep on driving. Although I earnestly wish my work computer was a mac, considering all I do on it is use adobe cs3 and chat here and on pidgin.