OK, let's say he shells out $50 CDN for an OpenBSD 5.4 CD from the OpenBSD website. Will installing that solve this guy's specific problems? He didn't mention SSH, firewalls, or elegant mail servers, so I thought I'd ask.
Mail servers, firewalls, and a decent development environment are the reasons why I would never dream of putting windows on my servers (personal or work); but they don't really matter that much to a user-end device like a laptop. Especially to a non-programmer/admin.