I’d like to take some time and dedicate this post to some alternative software that is available for your computer. All of the following software is free of charge..

Firefox
Firefox is a fairly well known alternative web browser… This browser is really gaining in popularity, as it recently passed 50 million downloads. The guys at mozilla dot org really do a nice job. The Firefox web browser is simply awesome. When it first came out, I was against it. Much like I was against netscape, and the original mozilla. But now, I am fully converted forever. Tabbed browsing, additional security, popup blocking, etc. There are tons of extensions that make this program even better… FoxyTunes for example will allow control of almost any media player via your firefox browser. Calander, FlashGot, FireFTP, it really is an admirable software suite. I hope the guys that work on this get what they deserve; And to help with that, I’m almost surely going to order a Firefox polo shirt to wear to work on “casual Friday”

ThunderBird
Thunderbird is the email client that compliments Firefox. It functions very similar to Outlook or Outlook express… But it goes far above and beyond in terms of security, and features. Most notable is the RSS subscription capability to make Blog or news browsing much more efficient. Again, there are many addons and extensions that can be very easily installed to customize this email client.

So let’s review… These softwares are free, they are more secure against spam, popups, “malware” in general, and they are very simple to install and use. If you’re like me, it’s fun to use something different. I completely deleted outlook express… I add/removed it in windows components, and then deleted all instances of “msimn.exe”. I’m going to take some screenshots of these programs with various extensions and themes… I’ll put them into a gallery.

Finally, I’m going to download and install Sun’s latest version of OpenOffice. Which, according to the AP, is going to be the killer of microsoft’s office suite. I’ll update this same post later with comments….