I had my work laptop crap out on me the day before an eight day international trip.

Anyway, two good things came from the experience--first, I bought an Acer laptop for $450 that beat my 1 1/2 year old (broken) $2,000 Sony Vaio in every area except weight. It's 5.3lbs versus 3.3lbs, but also included wireless N and Vista home premium. For those interested, 2+Mhz speed, 2Gig RAM on one stick (4Gig upgradeable), DVD Read/Write, 250Gig HD and 32 bit Vista from Best Buy for $449. Oh, and it lasts an hour longer on a battery charge!

The other nice surprise is that I read about and installed OpenOffice 3.0 online. This is an open source FREE set of programs that's just like MS Office, w/o the cost. You get Text, Spreadsheet, Drawing, Formula, Database, and Presentation. Unless you're a hard core Office user, you won't miss it one bit. The whole system has been built as a single system and has been improved for the past 20 years, yet only takes 142MB of space.

You don't have to totally give up on Microsoft, as you can save "word" documents in the latest "Word" format. That makes it easy and seamless.

Did I mention that it's FREE?

www.OpenOffice.org

 

I've been working with it with my windows 7 beta.
pretty seamless although it did hickup a little with importing some graphs from excel.
other than that it's fine.

 

I loaded Open Office, when the promotional MS Office went away on the new laptop with Vista.

 

I'm migrating more and more to open-source applications.

Right now, I'm typing this via the Firefox browser, and I recently upgraded to Eudora v8, which is their (Thunderbird/Penelope-related) beta version (and beta it definitely is, but I like it a lot). I recently found a nifty password encryption database called KeePass.

And OpenOffice, which I've been using in a trial sort of way on another computer, seems like a good bet, too. It has some odd things ("personality" I guess you could call it), but it's wonderfully leaner than the MSOffice -- word processing, spreadsheets, presentations all without that Microsoft software bloat. In fact, one of my tasks today (I'm rebuilding my main computer -- not so coincidentally a Vaio -- after a service nightmare) is grabbing and loading it here. HPH

 

There are also Mac versions of this type of software for those of us who REALLY hate Microsoft

 

I've had Open Office on my laptop for 3 years. It works fine for me, all files open correctly on my desktop MSWord. It loads slower than MSWord however.

 

Although it's not clearly documented, the 3.0 version of OpenOffice installs and runs (at least as much as I've tried it) on Vista x64. (The installation file says "Win32" in its name, so I was suspicious, but I couldn't find any documentation.) HPH

 

I've used Open Office for years on my Linux machines. I now have it installed on my XP machine too. It's a nice product. Not totally interoperable with MS Office, but pretty good.

 

I'm all Firefox, all the time too. After the mental 'break in' period, I find that it works much better than Explorer, is faster, and I get less junk on my computer.

I'll definitely be donating to the Open Office cause, and I feel like I've been "donating" to Microsoft (whether I like it or not) for far too long.

 

IMO, Opera (not open source) is the best web browser, and has been for years. Most of the features seen in the latest editions of Firefox and IE were first introduced in Opera.

The occasional difficulty with Opera is that some websites still refuse to write code that is compliant with open standards, and instead write Firefox/IE/Safari/etc.-specific code. Also, occasionally banks and such will check to see if you are using one of the browsers they have tested, and if you aren't they will give you a message that you should upgrade to a "current" browser. Rather annoying, since Opera is extremely "current," and tends to have a faster revision cycle time than the others.