After seeing a friend who is an expert Demo his Mac, I wanted to put my XP laptop on a skeet shooter and yell "Pull".
Just Do It.
Apple has a sale on refurbs on its website. Get one of the old G4 PowerBooks. I have the 12" for travel, hook it to the monitor at home. I do lots of photos, use Bibble or snag PS7 on eBay.
Tiger is just trouble free, buy a copy of Little Snitch for your outbound firewall. Then install FireFox with Adblock+, the FilterSetG, Noscript, a real hosts file (komando.com). Then Scrapbook, FasterFox, Unplug. No more getting killed with WinXP no more hassles with Linux. Networking troubles just go away with the Mac. Everything runs as a limited user in Tiger. Heck, even QuickBooks needs admin (read suicide) privileges in WinXP.
The Mac Just Works, Just Do It. I should have done this years ago.