The Consumer Complaints Blog

I was going to write an article on the Canadian banking system today. Or post an update to the false advertising article I did earlier, but I had to spend half my day trying to fix a problem with my crap Windows computer.

Today, it did some kind of automatic update which had the computer restart involuntarily. Okay? That was pretty bad. Good thing the work was saved. After restarting, I couldn’t get Outlook to launch at all. The computer froze and then restarted every time I tried to launch Outlook. Aaaaaaa!

Funny, Firefox works okay. Adaware seems to run. I wonder why this is happening? Oh I think I know. It’s another useless Microsoft update that just makes things worse. After half a day of fighting with it, enough was enough. I decided to do away with all non-essential Microsoft applications on the machine.

Extremely annoying, but the experience gave me the idea for writing this article.

A quick review of non-Microsoft applications that can be used to accomplish the exact same tasks as their commercial counterparts. You could of course do something radical like switch to a Mac; but we know that it is not always practical to change operating systems. Even Unix is not quite at the level a basic user would be comfortable with. Besides, Macs have their own set of problems and Apple is just a touch better than Microsoft at dealing with a complaint when things go wrong.

Let’s start with the web

You can do all your browsing with Firefox from Mozilla. It’s free. It’s open source and it works. For most things, you won’t ever need to launch Internet Explorer again. Did I mention that it’s more secure as well? The main problem is that web developers still have their heads jammed too far up Microsoft’s ass to make things cross browser compatible. But I rarely have any problems with Firefox so give it a try.

Need to check e-mail?

I just installed Thunderbird from Mozilla. I didn’t know about this ’til I was forced to find an alternative for Outlook today. I installed it and it is as good as (dare I say better than?) the mail program on my Mac. And I can tell you that it’s way better than Outlook. It has a good junk mail filter and is supposed to be more secure than Outlook. Oh yeah, it didn’t crash my system when running today. That was a huge bonus.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

Shouldn’t we be able to expect applications to run as kind of the minimum these days?

What about Office applications, you say?

Yes, yes. We all need word processors and slideshows and all that other good stuff. Thankfully, there is a free program for that as well. Yes, I did say free. OpenOffice has been around for a while. It’s a less bloated, open source alternative to the Office suite. I noticed they just released version 2.0 so it’s even more developed than when I first started using it. And it imports and exports to MS Office for your friends that don’t quite “get it” yet. Or at least that’s what you’ll be thinking when you see them paying for things they could get for free.

http://www.openoffice.org/

The OpenOffice Suite 2 comes with six applications. I don’t really know how they all work since I mainly use the word processor but here goes:

Write: http://www.openoffice.org/product/writer.html
A fully equipped word processor. Very nice and stable. Much faster than Word.

Calc: http://www.openoffice.org/product/calc.html
A spreadsheet program.

Impress: http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html
This seems to be like PowerPoint but probably better. I have no experience with this so please let me know what you think if you’re currently using it.

Draw: http://www.openoffice.org/product/draw.html
Used for drawings and diagrams. Again, no experience with this.

Base: http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html
SQL database tool.

Math: http://www.openoffice.org/product/math.html
Mathematics equation editor.

Admittedly, for some users of Windows, these tools may not be exactly what they want. But for about 95% of people out there, these tools can pretty much take care of anything they need to do with their computer. Before shelling out money for software, (or pirating) try these out. They’re stable, fast, reliable, and you can’t beat the price.

The point of all this being that you do not need to put up with junk. As a consumer, it’s your duty to send a message and stop putting up with garbage. The only message corporations understand is the one coming from their bottom line. You can try screaming and protesting and whining. But if you want to change things, hit corporations where it hurts. Right in the dollar signs.
Thanks for reading and if you like these tools, spread the word.