Have never used an intuos, but have used an A4 ultrapad on an old Mac7500 (OS8.1) with no trouble for about 4 years and have never regretted the purchase. Have recently bought a wintel pc (windows ME) (school compatibility for kids) and had no trouble tranferring the use of the tablet to the pc, as it was the serial version. All I needed to do was download the driver from Wacom, and remove the adaptor originally supplied for the Mac. I suspect (but don't know) that the better specs of newer tablets are irrelevant when they're actually in use - why wonder if it's shade 177 or 409 if it's doing the business? I sometimes think that something smaller would be more convenient - but those thoughts usually arrive when I can't think of what to put on the blank sheet! Personally, I'd try to draw hairy type stuff in painter -