Debt Free

In case you haven’t taken a trip down to your local software emporium or looked at the prices on Newegg.com recently, I’ll let you in on a little secret; software’s pretty darn expensive. It’s common place these days to find that, as computer prices have plummeted, you will spend far more on the software loaded onto a new computer than for the computer itself. If you’re trying to get debt free, that is not the optimum situation. You’re in a conundrum though. After all, you still have to get things done on your computer. How then to do it without spending your last dollar on apps?

 

The answer is found in the plethora of free or almost free software alternatives thoughtfully provide by developers all over the web. Here are some of my favorites.
 

For a free alternative to the king, Mac daddy of office suites, Microsoft Office, you should check out OpenOffice, available at http://www.openoffice.org. Developed by the gang over at a little company you may have heard of called Sun Microsystems, it really is a fantastic alternative to Microsoft’s suite. You’ll get a word processing application that can read Word docs, and save documents in a Word compatible format. Ditto for Excel and PowerPoint. It may not have all the integration functionality and cool interface that you’ll find in the latest versions of Office, but as an office suite, and you can’t edit and compose a feature magazine or newspaper with the same effectiveness that Word brings to the table, but it’s pretty darn good just the same. I’ve been using it one of my machines for about 2 years now and have been pretty happy.

 

If you want to create PDF documents from Word, Visio, Excel, or anything that you can print, take a look at PDFcreator and MyPDFCreator. They were free a few years ago, but they’re still a great alternative to the full fledged Acrobat software package for about 1/4 the cost. You can get a free download here:
http://opportunitiesaplenty.com/MyPDFCreator.html
 

For photo and image editing, try Paint.net. It is extremely full featured and won’t cost you a cent, but you should send in a few bucks for a donation so the guys don’t have to eat Top Ramen. It’s won all kinds of awards. Take a look at http://www.getpaint.net
 

Some PCs come with DVD drives, but no player application. That’s no problem. You can download a great DVD player for free from the team at InMatrix Media Solutions in the form of the Zoom Player. Download it here:
http://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_download.shtml#STANDARD
 

If you have DVDs that you’d rather make a backup copy of before the kids ruin it (like happened to my Shrek 3D DVD this weekend) you need DVD Shrink. You can get the free DVD backup utility here:
http://www.dvdshrink.org/what.html
 

Have a hard drive or floppy(??) that you want erased completely? I mean completely as in conforming to the D.O.D.’s requirements for data destruction. You can accomplish this feat using Kill Disk, a free hard disk eraser found here:
http://www.killdisk.com/
You can wipe out the entire drive, or just unused portions of it, and leave existing data untouched.
 

The PC environment is full of viruses and malware these days. Good antivirus applications can be really expensive, especially if you want to be sure they’re always updated and the definitions are current, except, of course, if you have the award winning AVG antivirus software (free version). If you want tech support or anti-spyware capability, you’ll have to pony up some cash, but if you have that covered, you’ll do far worse than free AVG antivirus. Get yours here:
http://www.grisoft.com/doc/products-avg-anti-virus-free-edition

Hopefully this will help you get your PC back to work, without breaking the bank.