iMac or MacBook? I can’t decide …

So this is the story: My PowerBook G4 now is approximately 3 years old and, much to my disliking, it’s slowly but steadily dying. One of the fans seems to have some mechanical oddity and screeches and makes unbearable noises, including not properly “faning”, which in turn heats up the book quite a bit and sometimes results in slowing down the whole machine.

While I have to admit that I heavily used the book all the time in all kinds of aspects (3D Software, Gaming, Adobe-Stuff up to CS3, some minor video editing) I’m still a little disappointed about the “little issues” coming up (like all of a sudden the special keys for adjusting volume/brightness ain’t working no more, the fan-thing, single pixels on the display dead, stuff like that).

However I thought about switching to a PC again, but there’s just no way I will work with anything windows-ish ever again and while I really like Linux it simply lacks the necessary (and fun) software. So I’ll definitely go with a new Mac, one of these:

• iMac

  The strongest, 24-inch version with 2gb ram, 500gb harddrive, … – you can read about the details in the apple-store anyways

• MacBook Pro

  The stronger 15-inch version that’d be, 2gb ram, 200gb harddrive (the 7.200rpm one, because what the heck does a fast cpu help with a dead slow hdd?), more details: Apple-Store.

The price is about the same, both ending up at roughly 2.500,- Euros, which is a hell lot of money (jeez, I don’t even want to think about how much in real money that is … 35.000,- good old ATS … freaking me out that is). And now I’m stuck with one problem: I can’t decide.

I really got used to a laptop and I’m dead sure I’d miss that, so the idea would be to keep the dying book and just use it for real mobile needs, low on resources and stuff so it can stay calm, and do the other stuff on the iMac.

But is there a way back to the desktop? Any ideas? Suggestions? Experiences?

HELP!