Thanks to everyone for replying. I bought Office Home and Student for £69.99 - £30 off as I bought the PC from the same place

If you have any children/nieces/nephews in college or Uni then you can get software really cheap here: http://www.software4students.co.uk/M...FVOY2AodRio26Q

Or, try this site.

Open Office is compatible with Microsoft office and Microsoft Office is compatible with Open Office. The difference is Open Office is free and Microsoft Office, well, need I tell you the cost.

Why not go the whole hog while you are at it.... Transfer over to Linux. There are hundreds of versions available and I can advise if you like.

Advantages with Linux is, NO VIRUS... Also, never need to defrag. So, with no need for a virus checker, your PC will run faster.

If you do need Windoze for any other apps or games, You can run any version inside Linux in a proggy called Virtual Box. I do this and play games and also run Photoshop, but its all inside a virtual machine.

If you need help or more info, Please msg me and I will get back to you.

Cheers

Nigel.

Nigalius,

I heartily approve of your message of enlightenment. I fear, however, that you'll find few willing to try anything other than what they know. It seems to me that most folk have come to accept that how they use their computers and how their operating system often lets them down for a host of reasons is the way it is and that there can't possibly be a better way.

The fact that there is a far superior alternative to Microsoft and even Apple seems to be almost impossible to grasp, but there it is. It is a fact! As you, yourself said, people only have to ask and there are whole communities waiting and eager to help!

Experts - please, be a little kinder to people who know nothing about computers!

Nobody being unkind here...

I think most experts will accept that making what might appear to be a big change in how most people now conduct business and a lot of their social interaction (i.e. using their computer over the internet.) is daunting. It can be done in small steps though & theoretically without too much disruption. There is help available which, in my opinion, is far superior to any assistance you'd get from a Microsoft or Apple helpdesk. I say this not only as someone who offers advice on various forums, but also from an end user's point of view. There really are extremely experienced people available who are more than willing to help resolve whatever problem may occur. Here's a rough guide to migrating from one OS to another that I did some time ago.

Going back to the unkind thing, I think it would be cruel of us experts/FOSS advocates to know of a better/safer/more stable alternative, but then not do what we can to make others aware! Now is a pretty good time to take advantage of the community based support that's available as it has matured a lot over the past few months/years.

Apologies for goiong so wildly off topic!

Rich, I would be keener to make the change..... if you would move in with us for a couple of months

Hi, I could go on talking about this all day but will of course remember that this is a Dog forum and not an Introduction to Linux forum.

I would like to give a suggestion though.... If you can buy a cheap secondhand computer, it can be very low spec, 500m ram is ample and 60gig h/d heaps, could easily get one I think for well under £100. take it home, then on your windows pc download a version of linux. Please take advice first to which version to download. Then, install it on to the cheap cmputer and simply play with it. If you do anything wrong, no probs... just re install it and start again.

In Linux you browse exactly the same as in Windoze, you can go directly to Yahoo and read/send e-mails exactly the same, download music exactly the same, use a full office suite that is the same as Microsoft Office, burn disks in a programme that is just as easy to use as Nero Express, I even use my icq account in Linux. But one difference is the cost of those proggys in Linux is Zero, in Win, total cost would be over £500. Also remember, No Viruses and No Defrag.

I am pretty sure that rich c is much more experienced than I am and am sure he could give better advice but if anyone wants help I am more than willing to help by phone or e-mail.

Incidentally, while I am typing this posting, I am using Linux. Also, on the same machine, I am downloading a film in Win XP which I have running in Linux.

Cheers

Nigel.

I like the suggestion about doing an install on an old, cheap PC. A 1Ghz, 512mb machine with even a 20GB disk drive will run pretty much most Linux distributions. the other options are, try out a Live CD or set up a virtual install of some sort. all reasonably easy to do and little/no risk to play about with. Don't worry about support, it's available almost instantly and worldwide!