Yes, that's my office, and my, um, secretary.
I own a small business which requires computers, and we have some personal computers at home, so software is a substantial investment around our house. Forget the actual machines themselves—don’t scratch those disks people, a computer can be easily replaced but oh, the software!
I’ve bootstrapped my little business along with the version of Office from 2002 that I already owned on my newer work computer and have decided that it really wasn’t going to work. It was crashing several times a day and loosing data occasionally. Disagreements between older and newer software was crippling my productivity and causing every imaginable error, but only on my deadlines. I’d been dreading it for months, but as I sat down to prepare my 2010 budget, I knew software had to be part of it.
I penciled out my budget (combined home and business) and had about $2,000 in software upgrades—from anti virus renewal, to a new Office suite for business (I wasn’t planning to upgrade the 2 home computers) plus the child-safety software for our daughter’s machine.
Ultimately, I consulted experts. That’s right, by experts, I mean Twitter. I poked around for alternatives and found people using Google Documents and Open Office as an alternative to the expensive Office Suite. A friend of mine works as a music teacher and travels between a studio and student’s homes. He’s found that Google Documents fits the bill for him because it acts as his file server. I work with legal documents and wanted to keep everything off-line and secured on my machine, so I choose to use Open Office. I also don’t want to rely on the Internet connection for productivity.
I easily converted all of my previous files to Open Office files, and kept .doc and .xls copies.
The only solution that wasn’t available to me as an alternative to Outlook and I’ve managed to get Windows Mail to fit that bill (it was built into my computer). (If anyone knows something better, I’m all ears!) I’m using Google’s calendar which syncs nicely with my Blackberry.
We subscribe to a software for monitoring the kids’ use and filtering for safety called “Safe Eyes” which is an excellent program, but at $50 a year, I’d love to reduce that cost too. A friend introduced me to to a free program called “McGruff Safeguard” which meets our needs for free!
I’ll still annually renew my Norton subscription, but now we can run three machines indefinitely at the cost of only the annual anti-virus renewals. Ok, yes, I realize a possible change of operating system or upgrade of Windows may be down the road somewhere… but I’m not ready to think that far ahead just yet.
If you’d like to try the transition as well, (or already have) I’d love to hear how it’s going for you at home or at work.
If you would like to try Google Documents you can reach that from the Google home page. Google Documents is free “cloud” software which meets most of your normal office suite functions. If you would like to try Open Office, you can find it at www.openoffice.org. It also has a program comparable to each office task including word processing, presentations, spreadsheets and databases. It’s a free download and very simple to install and convert your files.
Oh, and as for the $2,000 I saved. It’s going on my debt snowball—that’s an extra $2k in profit!
Also, an update, for those wondering how I’m doing on my 2010 goal: I haven’t made my snowball payments yet for January, but I am down ten pounds so far!
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Dump those disks, they’re not worth the headaches.
Can’t believe you used “tweet” as a method investigation, that line cracked me up. and yes I’ve heard of it before but thought the tweeters were tweeting they’re own horns.
I agree with previous commenter, “I commented experts and by experts I mean twitter” great line. I get my virus software through my IP so thats less of an expense and like you I can use those old office softwares for ever, I’m not too high tech.
I’m finding the internet far too stale. For instance, in the email front, I wanted something similar to Outlook. Web pages (including Microsoft’s) instructed me to Windows Mail. Turns out, its totally outmoded and doesn’t work with web-based mail. Thankfully, I was instructed by some fresher info that Microsoft has launched a better, more recent free product, Windows Live Mail. The Web is just way too stale anymore for me. I want to know what’s working for real people today, right now. This hour. Before somebody changes something.
Email: I’ve moved all of my email, business and personal, to gmail. You can filter like nobody’s business and send as that email address. I’ve got 5 addresses running through gmail. If a desktop solution is a requirement, Thunderbird beats Outlook.
Antivirus: AVG. Hit Google for the link to the free version. They tend to bury it on their site. Norton is a huge memory hog that doesn’t play well with other software.
It sounds like you’ve probably got a memory problem. For about $100 a computer geek will make your computer like new. Not BestBuy or GeekSquad, go find the closest guy w/ a shop in his basement, those guys are the best & have little overhead for you to finance.
Right on about AVG. My family has been using AVG Free for 3 years, and never had an issue. I got viruses with Norton – sometimes I felt like Norton itself is a virus, it causes so many problems! And the annual subscription was a pain, I always had to do stuff. I run a combination of AVG and AdBlocker (free again), which keeps my computer clear.
The other great thing about Gmail is it scans everything before download – I’m not sure WindowsMail does that very well, it probably hooks in with Norton, which in my experience takes longer. And contacts are easier to manage.
Browser – are you using Internet Explorer? That tends to crash a lot too – try Firefox.
Bottom line – after a computer purchase, we never pay for anything, except for a little memory upgrade a few years down the road. For every software you must pay for, there are tons for free, to include small business budgeting. Open Source software really does rock!
I second Jason’s recommendation of Thunderbird for desktop email software. There are even plugins available for syncing your Google contacts (Zindus) and the Lightning plugin gives you an integrated calendar. A third plugin called Provider for Google Calendar will let you sync your Google Calendar with lightning…
On the antivirus front, I’ve been trying out Microsoft’s free antivirus offering, Microsoft Security Essentials. Luckily I’ve not had any security issues to test it on but it seems pretty unobtrusive in it’s background monitoring.
Thanks for the ideas everyone! I will look into AVG for the other computers and make a note for it when my Norton expires on my work computer. I’ve used it for years and always liked it. (Especially so now, that I’m not using any old software!)
I decided to take the plunge and change everything over when I had a problem in my master-tables. I knew I’d need to back it up and wipe it clean, so I just decided to not re-install the old software at that time.
So far, I haven’t regretted it.
I will go look for Thunderbird. So far I’m using Google Chrome for a browser and I LOVE it, it’s so fast! I use i.e. 8 as a backup because it’s the only browser that works for downloading my documents from my client’s Web sites (arrgh!).
Do you guys know if I can import my email archives into Thunderbird? I really want to keep my old mail from outlook. Lots of important stuff there.
If you install Thunderbird side by side with Outlook on your old machine, you will be able to import everything into Thunderbird. You can then download Mozbackup which will allow you to backup all of the Thunderbird E mails you have, and restore it on your new machine. See links below:
http://support.real-time.com/tbird/outlook_import.html
http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/
Thunderbird will import from Outlook, outlook express, and text files for sure.
love AVG, but recently have been using Panda Cloud Antivirus (free), i’m loving it better than AVG, even less of a memory hog.
Try K9 web protection (for kids filter) – free at Download dot com.
Open office and google documents are nice – use both of them.
heard great thing about thunderbird, but prefer gmail as it’s available anywhere i have internet access
good luck
I second everyone’s comments about Norton, it works but like Mcafee it’s a memory hog. Not an issue on my PC’s but problematic for the kids.
Add to your list Gimp for image editing, I used PhotoShop and PaintShopPro in the past and Gimp does everything I need it to do.
Google SketchUp 7 also does a phenomenal job with images and is free.
If you check with your employer you might have access to Microsoft’s home use program. I got a copy of Office Enterprise 2007 for $20 and there were a lot of other program’s to choose from. They didn’t advertise the benefit, I just heard about it through word of mouth.
Just geting off paper is a big deal and learning how to buy IT equipment at a good price is very important.
I personally tend to favour SSuite Office’s free office suite. Their software also don’t need to run on Java or .NET, like so many open source office suites, so it makes their applications very small and efficient. – http://www.ssuitesoft.com/ssuiteexcalibur.htm
Check with your ISP for anti-virus software. We get software for free through Comcast just for being a subscriber… it’s now Norton (http://security.comcast.net/)
It talks about some “Online Family Norton” for kids too. If you don’t have Comcast maybe your ISP offers something similar?