A quest
In the next month I will be making 2 computer transitions. Unfortunately, neither of these is to Apple… but on with the story. For home, I picked up an inexpensive desktop from woot.com to replace my noisy built-by-me computer from 2002. For me, I found out last Friday that I would not be getting my laptop back from the warranty service and would need to buy a replacement (funded by the warranty company – thankfully). Faced with the task of setting up 2 new systems, I have decided to do something radical.
Be legal with all of the software.
Yup, you heard me right. I am going to do my very, very best to actually personally have licenses for all the software on both of my owned-by-me computers.
And since I am not magically sitting on a massive wad of cash – I am going to do this, at least initially, with mostly open-source or free software.
I don’t think It will actually be that hard. Here’s what I’m going to do:
I already own XP Pro
GIMP to replace my crack Photoshop
Buy Quicken instead of using the “borrowed” copy from my mom
Picasa is free photo organizing
Adobe Reader is free
Firefox is free
Skype is free
iTunes is free
Cute PDF writer Is an awesome free PDF maker
Open Office to replace my borrowed-from-work copy of MS office
The only tricky one is finding a good open-source Audio editor or an inexpensive one. I’m spoiled on using Wavelab at work and can’t afford the $500-600 it costs to buy a current version of that. I just found out when creating the link for Wavelab, that the make 3 levels of Wavelab and there’s a $99 Wavelab Essential. Hopefully I can figure out if that will work out. Otherwise, currently I’m experimenting with Audacity for free or Sound Forge Audio Studio that costs around $50. Neither of them at first blush are easy to crossfade with. I don’t know what I am going to do here yet. If anyone has a solution let me know. I’d appreciate it.
I’ll keep posting about this as I live it out. Hopefully it won’t be too hard.
I have just been faced with pretty much he same situation as you – except with only one computer to equip.
I have Firefox, Adobe Reader and Skype, with Open Office and GIMP soon to follow (that’s not all, but those are the ones we share.)
I’m glad there is such an abundance of free software out there… I don’t know what I’d do without it.
[...] Getting an early start on my project I have been borrowing a laptop from work since December when my laptop went back for repair. I’m still using it, (another story for another time) but hopefully for not much longer since i’m supposed to get my credit to buy a new laptop soon. Last night I did something clumsy and infected the crap out of the borrowed laptop. Oops. I punted and decided to reinstall windows instead of trying to clean it. So now I get to do a dry run on this laptop like I explained the other day. [...]
Getting an early start on my project « johncornelius.tv >> John Cornelius’ Weblog said this on April 6, 2008 at 8:36 am |