not to Mac, which I can’t afford, but to Linux. yeah, yeah, I’ve been talking about it for years, but I’m serious this time. C got a copy of Ubuntu by mail that had both a livecd and an install. tonight and today I tried the live on the laptop, and it worked very nicely, including connecting to a couple of wifi networks. the power management, unfortuntately, didn’t work at all, but I got a tip from one of the freegeeks that I’m going to try before I do more research.
of course, I’m not actually going to install it on the laptop until it goes out of warranty, but we do have other computers with no such issues. 
the only caveat I have right now is that I *really* like Picasa, and it’s Windows only….