Pre-Owned Mac...

I'm thinking about getting a Mac to have a play with - probably a laptop rather than desktop, although I'm open to both... Any suggestions what I should be looking at, bearing in mind that I'm leaning towards pre-owned at the moment? I'm having a poke around on eBay, but there's a huge choice for a complete novice.

It would be mainly for learning Mac OS X, a fair bit of surfing and general use, and perhaps I would look into installing World of Warcraft on it, so preferably a half-decent graphics card.

Thanks in advance!

For WOW I think you'll need an non-integrated GPU. When I still played it, WOW ran like a dream on my MacBook Pro.

Forget PPC - Intel, at least 2g ram.

Watch out for the mid-2007 MBPs they are the ones affected by the dodgy Nvidia chips.

To learn modern stuff you will want Leopard or Snow Leopard.

Make sure you but something with an aluminium unibody - very durable.

Avoid any laptop in the old white plastic case, they split. Durability of the new white unibody is too early to judge.

I'd have a look at Mac Mini's. You can plug your legacy keyboards, mice and monitors (with adapters) in to it and just play with them.

For the latest OS X you really want the Intel chip - so any post 2006 box or so should be fine.