My deepest apologies. It wasn't meant to be insulting, but on re-reading, I can clearly see how it would be.

edit: By way of explanation of where that came from, when my parents found themselves in a similar situation of "slow computer", and had gotten tired of the nuke-and-repave route, they asked me what to do. They were clearly candidates for running Linux -- there's nothing they did that required proprietary software (with one exception, which my dad now runs in a virtual machine). Yet, I told them to buy a Mac, because I didn't want to be their support person. They're very happy with the choice.