yeah if your storage is network attached, then your new mac will read and write to it fine if you can share your NAS with SMB or AFP (afp is the go!) or.. if it can be an iSCSI disk, even better

Have a click through this sticky thread, which highlights for you which applications you might find yourself using. There are some gems in there which just might be the clincher in deciding to switch.

My First Mac - Help Buying and Getting Started with Your New Mac

Although a bit simplistic, pretty helpful site for new transitioners.

Thanks for all the great input. FYI I am picking up my shiny new macbook air tomorrow.

I decided that the main use for the notebook was portability, I have probably used my notebooks optical drive once this year, and probably printed from it once as well.

Am no longer considering running windows on it, will jsut be my primary internet/office notebook, perfect for taking to the office and home again most days.

And as far as the photoshop question goes well I had a longthink about it and what I do with photoshop there are plenty of less power hungry programs out there I could use, after all i usually just crop and play around with colours, sometimes remove the background layer etc but again this is rare.

Email, and Spreadsheets are its main job, along with usenet downloads so combined with is portability I opted for the Air.

Once again thank you so much for all the advice.

On a related note, was thinking of jsut going for iwork or do you reccomend buying office for mac? do I really gain much, Iam keen to keep this running as smoothly as possible and dont like the thought of putting MS stuff on it.

Oh and any decent colour laser printers? I checked and my OKI C3100 (yes a bit dated but great printer and not high use anyway) is not compatible with MAC.

iWork should get you out of trouble most of the time with office-y documents, and there's always OpenOffice available for OSX.

For a decent little platform-agnostic colour laser, look at the small Samsungs. True PostScript, small footprint, quiet, and toner is affordable. Excellent value all 'round.

Oh, and welcome to the fold

Any MUST HAVE accessories I should grab when I pick up my MBA tomorrow
/

A case of some sort.

For web use Safari or FF3, email use Mail (standard), spreadsheets and word proccessing, use either iWork from apple, or Office:mac, for usenet use unison.

If I was you I would get a macbook, nearly half the price, better features, and they are fairly thin aswell, not as thin as the air, but still fairly thin.

I havent had any experience, but the airs at myer lag when mousing over the dock, so I imagine photoshop would be fairly slow. I have used it on my macbook and runs great, enver had any problems.

EDIT: didnt read a couple of the followup threads

HTH,
Beau

Seconded, look at a nice sleeve for your new baby. An all-aluminium exoskeleton will only look baby-beautiful as long as it is protected from the books, pens, bumps and knocks it will encounter as it grows up.

Do make sure to get the USB-to-RJ45 adaptor. Wifi is almost everywhere. Key word, almost.

If you have a spare hard drive around -- doesn't have to be huge, 80 GB will do but more is better -- then buy a decent little FireWire and/or USB enclosure to go around it, and use this just for Time Machine backups. This stays at home, and is plugged in somewhat regularly so that backups are done automagically.

Unless you're really adept at trackpadding (and the MBA has a nice pad with multi-touch gesturing) a baby standard-optical mouse, and as the MBA only sports the one USB port, a small road-warrior's non-powered USB hub.

If you want to get truly fancy, and will insist on taking your own wifi broadband connection with you wherever you go (say, by using a 3G cellular network) you can get an ExpressCard-to-USB adaptor that'll let you drop in a 3G carrier's modem and use it on the MBA.

if you want a book of words to ramp up your Mac leet skillz quickly, look for "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" published by O'Reilly Media. Most excellent.

I think that's about it, really.

Just wanted to say Thank You to everyone for your advice, I am now onto day 2 as a MAC user with the macbook Air, ended up getting it for $2198 with iwork and on 12 months interest free (wasn't what I intended but the salesperson just kept giving, I do enjoy playing the game) So I was pleased with the result.

The DVD sharing worked perfectly for installing iWork and the touchpad is great am glad I did not buy the mouse afterall.

Once i got used to how the whole network locations are accessed, my network storage is now easily accessible (both read and write).

Have basically given it a fairly heavy (by my usage anyway) workout over night and am getting around 4hrs on the battery which I am pleased with.

Just so easy and light to use on my lap on the couch and I do not notice any performance issues when its not on AC like some of my windows notebooks give.

Overall I am very pleased and i think that if this experience continues I will very soon be updating the rest of my notebook and PC collection to MAC in the next few months.

First stop will be an iMac to replace my chunky media centres.....as soon as they have true HDMI out (can't be that far away)

Havent found a case I like yet so am being very careful, hopefully wont be too long until I find one I like.

Anyway, I am one very pleased new MAC owner.....Thank You to all who gave me advice on this purchase.