Use this Software: OpenOffice and GIMP

As of a week ago, I thought "Vista" and "open source" were incompatible words. But now I'm an experiment to use only open source. Here are a few results:

OpenOffice has been great over the last week. I actually like it better than Word. I've used it to edit large documents and formatting-heavy documents. After one crash upon installation, it has worked perfectly. I've edited documents created in Word, and saved documents in Word format, as well as pdf. As of now, I trust it both with important documents of my own editing and documents that I need other people to be able to open in Word. No need for Word anymore.

I just installed GIMP to replace my aging version of Photoshop, which I was afraid to install on Vista. I see Photoshop as an indispensible tool for any entrepreneur. So far, I like GIMP a lot. I've just been messing around. It's not a Photoshop clone, but as a Photoshop user I find it pretty easy to get around (given the background fact that Photoshop may be the hardest-to-figure-out piece of software I've ever touched).

As I argued, the best software isn't just free - it's also open source. Firefox is open source (good); Google Chrome is not (less good). Google Chrome is the Ralph Nader of browsers - don't let it mess up the election results.