So he's got a five-year-old machine that needs a new system board. I don't care whether it's a Mac or a PC; that's never going to make any sense.
I'm not a PC-hater or anything; I spent years doing corporate desktop support. I just find that since I started using a Mac, the percentage of computer time that I spend on maintaining and messing around with the computer itself has gone way down, and the percentage of time that I spend on actually doing the things I want to do has gone up. You can get under the hood as much as you want to if you feel like it -- hell, all a Mac is is a UNIX box with a really nice GUI on top of it -- but if not, then you almost never have to actually waste any time monkeying around with the computer itself. I spent years having to deal with users' DLLs and registries and incompatible drivers and everything like that; using a Mac at home has meant that I almost never have to deal with any of that anymore.
Yes, Macs are more expensive than PCs. But I use my computer for a couple of hours a day, every day of my life. It's easily worth it for me to pay a few hundred extra dollars once up front in return for a vastly better computer experience every day for years. It might not be worth it for somebody else.
