There are free lunches ;)

Its time to head back to school after a 2 yrs in industry. These two years have turned me into nothing less than an epicurean in true sense of the word. Used to free internet/coffee/21 inch monitor/super fast PC/free softwares just a click away/free local and international phone calls/ lots of money at the end of the month/...the list continues. It has to be back of austerity of college days, where each penny spent bites. Being a software engineer in the company of other software engineers have ensure that I dont have the financial security as I truly believed that penny saved is fun sacrificed. As I open my excel sheet titled 'finances' again and again and try to calculate how much money do I have to spend in the coming two years at my b-school the furrows on my forehead deepen. Still I hope to get the loan for laptop a luxury in which I indulged just for the heck of it. That would bring some sort of respectablity to my bank account.

My laptop has the meanest of all softwares. Mean featurewise. MS has made sure that its philanthropy with software is not to compare with philanthrophy of its Chief Software Architecht and his wife. What I get for free is Microsoft Works + Outlook Express and both suck. The moment you try to indulge in something slightly fancy they remind you that its a free ware and one should not be expecting anything out of the bare necessity from it. So much for free software. So I thought can we stay free of MS' bread crumbs??? Thus began my search for free softwares on net. And i have just started using them.
For now I have tried the following softwares:
1. Open Office 2.0.
2. Mozilla thunderBird.
3. Mozilla firefox.
4. Google Earth.
5. AVG antivirus.
6. Webaroo.
7. Google Desktop.
8. Google Picassa.

Well I have been able to live without any licensed softwares for now. I was ecstatic when I was able to create my resume with tables and all fancy word formatting and was able to export it to a pdf using openoffice. Impress, the open office equivalent of powepoint seemed powerpacked to.

For now atleast I think I can live without any costly softwares.

Reviews:
Excellent review of mozilla thunderbird vs. outlook express
http://www.beust.com/weblog/archives/000118.html
http://beust.com/outlook-thunderbird.html

http://www.physorg.com/news2292.html

Google Desktop vs. Windows search
http://www.website101.com/arch/archive158.html

AVG Antivirus reviews:
http://www.tonytoews.com/editorial/avgantivirusreview.htm
http://www.software-antivirus.com/program/avg-antivirus-review.html