Pimp My PC (how I outfitted my netbook for free while my main computer was in the shop)

I have a *bad* mac.  Macs are supposed to be solid, trustworthy — my mac spends a lot of time in the shop.  In it’s short three year life I have had 4 hard drives replaces, the DVD drive, the fan, the casing and this time, the logic board.    The computer has been in the shop now for three weeks.  Thank goodness for the warranty — but my clients can’t take a three week break from my services, the work has gotta get done — what’s a girl to do?

Here’s how I outfitted my netbook PC (for free – mostly) to get the work I needed to do done while my computer was in the shop.

I use gmail for my e-mail and do a lot of work online — so about 70 percent of what I needed was taken care of that way.   For the rest:

Word Processor/Powerpoint/Spreadsheet: StarOffice — free from Sun and I actually like the word processor better than the new Word.   Going between Word and StarOffice was pretty seamless – except for powerpoints… My backup was google docs.

Web Editor: I started out with PSPad but I like to be able to see what I’m doing.  I ended up with Mozilla’s Kompozer which worked really well (I usually use Dreamweaver).

FTP Client: Filezilla – Again, free and really easy to use.

Timer: OfficeTime for PC (I use the mac version – the PC version is free beta until January).

Photo Editor: Gimp — works great for the tiny photo edits I needed to make.

Audio Editor: Audacity — I use garage band on the mac – -but audacity worked fine too.

Screencasts – Jing — you can do 5 minute videos for free (who want to watch videos longer than that anyway)

To do list – I love playing with mac based “productivity” suites — but for the past few weeks I’ve been using toodledo  with a gmail gadget and on my iphone — nice

My big cheat: I downloaded a 30 day trial of Adobe Acrobat which as been very useful since I’ve had a lot of form making and file manipulation to do.

Still, I’m happy that I could outfit my PC to work without breaking the bank