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An alternative to Office

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

Have you ever had this…

You fire up your brand new PC and go to use Word or Excel. You sit there for a few minutes scratching your head and wondering why half the features seem to be missing.

Then it dawns on you - this isn’t MS Office! And you’d be right. It’s actually Works Suite - a cut down version of MS Office that ships with most new PCs.

Now before you reach for your wallet to order the full blown MS Office Suite be aware of the free alternative - Open Office.

Open Office looks very similar to MS Office and has most of the features, and a few that MS Office doesn’t have such as conversion to PDF format! It’s also fully compatible with all MS Office formats so you can still open, edit and save MS Office files from other people.

You can download it from http://www.openoffice.org.

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Be nice to your PC

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

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You know, if folks were as nice to their PC as they are to their pets we would all live in a happier world…

Perhaps once a month, give your PC a colonic irrigation - OK, not literally (although I’m sure some of you are tempted).

First off, clean out any unwanted malware that may have accumulated. Download and run Ad-Aware Personal, and Spybot. Make sure they are updated before you run them.

Then run Disk Cleanup (Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup).

Finally kick off the disk Defragmenter (Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter).

Now go and have a cup of tea leaving your PC in private for an hour or so…

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