Free World (part I)

As promised, I am now going the write about what happened after my Microsoft Office 2007 license expired. I decided it was time to go legal(again). Why again? Because my pc is full with licensed software, licensed games and freeware. Now it was time to do the same thing again. The only difference here was that now, I had no funds available to buy anything. Therefore, except for Windows, every other software should be free.

The first thing I started with was protection software. Since Vista is now far better when comes to security than XP, I've done some research and it seems that, if one is behind a router, you set its' firewall and combined with the one build in vista that's all you need. (from a firewall point of view).
Next up, antivirus. unfortunately, there are not many options out there. I've used AVG, Avast, Bitdefender free edition and one or two others, all of them, of course, vista compatible.
The one that eventually remained in here was AVG. Not many reasons here, it just seemed best for me. Note to everybody else, the best protection is yourself! If you stay low, do not enter suspicious sites or download strange files you will be most of the time safe no matter if you have or don't have an antivirus installed.
It's time for firewalls. Again, not many free options here. I will start with Zone Alarm. At the end of the installation process I received a blue screen(it was the second time in 'it's' life I've seen one.
After rebooting in windows, it seemed that the installation actually finished. The application worked and started asking questions(that is what a firewall does :) ). However, being concerned because of the bsod and since I really did not liked the interface, of it went. Next up was Comodo, an application that I dealt with in the past. I liked the interface then, I liked it now, I knew how to adjust it so that it wont bother me too much and also to work with my torrent client so...it stayed!
Moving on to torrent clients since I mentioned it: In this domain I can say there are a lot more options. For me, there were only two: Azureus or utorrent. I choose utorrent because one, this IS a notebook and two, Azureus is already installed on my pc so a new software to deal with seemed a lot more fun.
Next up, office platform. We all need to write a letter or a C.V using a more powerfull text editor that notepad, make spreadsheets, presentations etc. Therefore we all need Microsoft Office! Or not :). Since I decided to play it free, I installed OpenOffice (the best alternative to the office suite for microsoft; or so some say). If it is so or not I can't tell so soon. It seems ok for now, I managed to open all the documents I had without any problems. The only issue is that this office suite doesn't come with an e-mail client like M Office does so I had to install another application.
We now arrived at e-mail clients. Up until now i only used either Microsoft Office or the web interface form Gmail. Now it was time to move. I chose the first thing that got into my hand, which was Windows Mail. It is a sort of reconfigured, redesigned and eventually renamed Outlook Express. It's ok I guess. I noticed the lack of setting any rules from a click. The option was there but a little too difficult. I wanted to try another one and I went to a very known company - Mozilla. Their e-mail client is called Thunderbird. It is pretty nice and the first thing I want to talk about is the fact that I could install add-ons. And one particular that I liked it was the one that minimized it to tray so it would stay there after I close it and continue to check for new e-mails and notify me accordingly. Great tool.
The 'perfect companion', or so their 'parents' called it is the web browser Firefox. Why firefox? I know it is not the best browser out there (opera is by far THE best) but I got used to it and I really enjoy installing new themes or extensions. Actually, I was quite happy that I discovered a NEW add-on which makes part of the browsing experience far better.This was one of many examples that makes surfing a lot more fun and entertaining, and that is way I choose to stay with Firefox.

Well, I guess this is the end of part I. More software to follow. Stay tuned ;)

V