Office Suite
Now that we have your system protected to some level, lets get some productivity out of you. Probably the most heavily used application by desktop users, from your novices to your high end professional, is your office suite Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Actually, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have become synonymous with Office Suites but in reality this is Microsoft’s version of the Office Suite and they are not cheap. Best case if you have to pay for it is a couple hundred dollars using a student discount. If you have to buy for several desktops for your small company this can quickly run into the thousands of dollars.
"But wait," you say," you told me none of these programs would cost me anything." And they won’t my friend. A great product called OpenOffice to the rescue. This is hands down one of the coolest and best free programs every made (next to the Linux kernel itself). OpenOffice runs on any platform from Windows, Apple, Linux, Solaris, you name it. It will also read and create Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. It even has some great features that even Microsoft Office, to date, is lacking. One of the coolest is the ability to write your documents straight to PDF format. In Windows, and most other environments, this requires you to purchase additional software on top of your already inflated cost Office Suite. I have to be honestly, with this product, as well as the others I talk about, I have know idea how these companies can offer such a high quality product for free and my only advice about it is, don’t argue, take their generosity, smile, and say thank you.
Browser
Let me be upfront from the start so no one thinks I’m trying to trick them. Just about everyone who knows me, knows I am a big fan and user of alternative operating systems. I'm real big on Linux and also enjoy using FreeBSD, Solaris, and would love to have an Apple. Even with all that said, my main day to day machine is still a Windows box and even though I really don’t agree with the way Microsoft does certain things, I try very hard not to be a Microsoft basher, there are plenty of those and I honestly would feel like some what of a hypocrite. So this next recommendation is not to turn you off of Microsoft but to honestly help you protect you system.
Email is probably the spot where you are most vulnerable to hacker attacks followed closely by Internet Explorer on a Windows box. Internet Explorer is the default browser on Windows and Microsoft tied it into its operating system so that it could do all sorts of cool things. Problem is, hackers have figured out ways to get into your system now just by you hitting a bad webpage. This is bad, very bad. While yes, there are ways you can tighten down your Internet Explorer making this more difficult, the one thing I recommend is trying a new browser altogether.
My browser of choose is Firefox and it’s not just for security I enjoy Firefox. Because Firefox is Open Source, you can get all types of plug-ins that really add a lot of capability to you browsing experience. Some of my favorite is “Tab browsingâ€, “Developer Extensionsâ€, and “Ad Blockâ€. Firefox also has some very nice built in functionality like Pop up blocking. It’s just a nice alternative to Internet Explorer. [side note] You can’t totally remove Internet Explorer off your Windows box because certain sites like Microsoft Update which we discussed earlier, are dependent on Internet Explorer. [/side note]