My computer crashed last week. The tech support guy from Dell was helpful. He got me up and running. He had to help me do a full system restore. Basically that wipes out everything on your computer and gets you back to square one as if the computer just arrived in the Dell box.

When he first mentioned this was what we had to do to fix the problem, I told him, "This is why we’re all going to own Apple computers someday, isn’t it?" The Dell guy thought that was funny. Even through his foreign accent, I could tell that line made him smile. I like it when I can make the tech support guys smile.

In this process, I had to back up all my data on my external hard drive and then reinstall all the software after the system was restored. I reloaded most of my original software, but I elected to use this opportunity to do a little trial run with my Office suite. Rather than reloading MS Office, I downloaded the free Open Office Suite. Daryl mentioned it to me a couple of weeks ago. He wasn’t recommending it. He just mentioned it.

I’ve given both the Open Office spreadsheet and word processing programs a pretty good run the last couple of days. Here’s my initial reaction. So far, I’ve been able to do everything I would have normally used MS Office to complete. The Open Office programs are fairly intuitive if you’re used to the MS version; however, there were a couple of functions I had to hunt around for. Generally speaking, the programs seem to be pretty powerful, but they’re not very sexy. In other words, you get what you pay for.

I’ll probably use Open Office for a little while longer then reload my MS software. I just wanted to experience what life is like on the bleeding edge of technology. And now I know I can survive if the MS empire ever collapses.

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