Is a Pokertracker a good thing for a beginner?

Let me first specify that by "beginning player", I do not mean someone just starting out - but rather, lets say someone who is within their first 5000-10,000 hands of serious poker.

I used a poker tracker for a little while and then stopped - my reason for stopping had nothing to do with poker - I am using a Mac and so wanted to get a Mac tracker - but then there was a possibility that I would be switching over to a Windows machine and so did not want to invest in the Mac tracker.

So, with that in mind, I am questioning whether pokertracker is a good thing for a player who is just starting out. I definitely understand the benefits of tracking your play - certainly the information is useful.

My concern is that it can be easy to rely on a pokertracker to guage your performance - and that just as judging on the basis of immediate results, this can cause problems.

Consider, for example, that over your first few hundred hands, you may be getting better than average hands - and this will be reflected in your stats - now, since you are just a beginning player, your natural instinct may be to look at your stats and see that your VP$IP is around 28% - which seems high - and so your natural reaction is to then tighten up.

But in this case, this would be the wrong move. Your VP$IP is a result of your better than average hands - by making this adjustment, you are likely to become too tight later on.

The other side is that I think that a pokertracker discourages players from assessing their individual actions. When you are learning and building your skill, you need to look at each play in detail and learn to ask the right questions to assess your play - a pokertracker will give you some easy answers, but it won't help you in those specific situations.

My feeling is that a Pokertracker should not be used at all until you have about 5000-10,000 hands under your belt. By then, you should have become familiar with most of the fundamentals of the game and you should be able to judge your individual plays reasonably well. Then you can start doing the fine-tuning, for which a pokertracker is an excellent tool.

To me though, for the beginner, using a pokertracker to improve your game is like using a butter knife to chop down a tree.