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I have been using open source software... some of it still sucks bad, some
doesn't suck as bad. I was kind enough to research the links I used to
download this stuff and make it clickable. This is here for me as much as
anyone else, I forget what I like. For WYSIWYG editors for websites, I tried NVU and KompoZer fried my website... so I'm sticking with Expression Web for now, even though it's got more quirks and issues than most freeware! Printing to PDF, why waste paper? I have tried a few different programs, but PrimoPDF wins. Screw Adobe and their $600 program to print to PDF... bastards! Email and Web Browsing: I've had my parents on Thunderbird and Firefox for so long they are lost without them. I added Sunbird calendar to my Thunderbird... it worked nicely for a couple days and I was impressed, then it started asking me for passwords to calendars I didn't have. It also crashed a lot more often than Outlook did. I'm also unable to sync my cell with Tbird or Sbird. If I had to, I could use it... but I'm not there yet. OpenOffice. It really does look a lot like Microsoft Office. But... it doesn't act like it all the time. I was unable to properly print an envelope. Excel worked nearly exactly the same, I was impressed. But Word/Writer is basically used by me to print envelopes... nothing much more. So, I uninstalled it... maybe a future version will work for me. I think a new version is out, but I haven't ventured to try it yet. FileZilla is no WS_FTP but I'm still using it because I'm currently using Windows 7 and it doesn't like my old WS_FTP. It has its issues and bugs, but for the most part it works. It now does multiple connections and tabbed ftp'ing. 7zip... compression utility, replaced WinRar which in turn replaced WinZip. I am very happy with this software, it's faster and squishes most things down a bit more than a rar will go. I'm very happy with it, yes, I said it twice. I'm sometimes confused by the .7z extension. I'm disappointed with Yahoo's linux version of its messenger, but Pidgin is useable. It's about the plainest IM client I've seen to date. Now I can't even find the link to YM, but found it here. Gaim has become Pidgin... For audio, Audacity, I've only made a few clips with this program but it looks like a real beast of a program... especially for the price (free). I've recently cut a bunch of mp3 discs up with it, those are the single mp3 that someone lazily put the entire CD into. A 50 minute mp3 track is lame. It did a wonderful job at slicing up that single mp3, a lot of work though. For video, VirtualDub has always served me well. GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) has a lot of great features, it's not entirely user friendly still, but neither is Photoshop. This program is somewhere between Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop. Corel bought out Jasc, now owns both, and being a Corel product, it now takes a long time to load. JkDefrag is an excellent defragger, and CCleaner is an excellent crap cleaner (yes, that's what the extra C is supposedly for), also Defraggler, also by Piriform, is an excellent file defragmenter. I also like MyDefrag for defragmenting the hard drive and use that now. After running CCleaner, then defrag, this computer runs almost a bit faster. Free is good, in fact, it's better than the paid-for stuff. I installed Avast antivirus on my aunt's computer... it's picked up a few things so far. It's free, you get what you pay for. It doesn't remove some viruses, doesn't even see them, but it works better than AVG does, by far. I'll stick with Norton Antivirus, just the antivirus, not Internet Security or any of that extra crap. I still need a webcam proggy for multicams... but I'm thinking that eventually I'll just buy more IP cams and sell my current cams. Problem solved, will work with any system, even a Mac. Once a few of these can do what I need them to do, I may then be ready to switch to Linux or whatever and still be functional. I hope this information helps. |