[macfantn]

replacing an ibook g4 which is a little long in the tooth, i bought it refurbished but had the HD die twice. not sure about buying another refurb, thoughts opinions welcome. Also if i buy new is 2 gigs of ram going to make a big difference over the stock 1 gig? i am a little strapped for cash and may have to finance the machine.

[macfantn]

getting to the drive on my ibook was painful terrible design IMO

[dowNNshift]

I can relate, as I was in a similar situation with my iBook G4 getting tired.
My best recommendation is to visit a brick and motar retailer to compare the white and black MacBook models. All models have an equal level of 'snappiness', although if you're planning on running Parallels or any kind of VMWare you'll be best off maxing out the RAM at 2GB. Don't waste your money on the OEM upgrade, Crucial is selling the 2 GB memory kit for $87 bucks.

The MacBooks hard drive is very easy to get to... so if you buy a model with a smaller hard drive, you can always upgrade it to a larger and/or faster SATA 2.5 HDD later.

In short, the majority of features that differentiate the range of models are mostly customer upgradeable (memory and hard disk drive) and can be done at your own pace.