At about ten o’clock yesterday evening I decided that I was done. After realizing that it took my computer longer to load Microsoft Word than any other program (with the sole exception of Photoshop, which took the same amount of time), after reading yet another article about Microsoft’s corporate practices, and after reading about yet another major flaw in a major Microsoft product, I decided that I was done with Microsoft.<\/p>\n
I’ve made a vow: I’ll not use a Microsoft product again so long as any reasonable alternative exists.
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\nSo I set about purging my hard drive of Microsoft’s crap. This is a bit easier for me than for others since I have a Mac, but if I ever own a PC again I’ll use Linux or Unix instead of Windows. They’re not hard to use, they’re not expensive, and they’re not the offal of an unethical giant. (And yes, I’m aware that Apple is not without its blemishes, not the least of which was the Pepsi\/Apple iTunes ad during the Superbowl, but I don’t think a serious case can be made that Microsoft and Apple are equivalent.) Interestingly, even though I have a Mac I found that I had a few Microsoft programs hanging about. They were:<\/p>\n
Of course, there are a few files running around my hard drive with Microsoft-created file formats (my .RTF documents, for instance) but I don’t think you want a catalogue of all of my files. John Ashcroft might, but I suspect that the readers of Alas couldn’t care less.<\/p>\n
The first Microsoft program to go was Internet Explorer. Mozilla’s Firefox<\/a> is faster, better-looking, and more closely follows industry standards. Not only do I get a back-up browser that’s not from Microsoft, but it’s more powerful and I like it almost as much as my primary browser.<\/p>\n Next up I cleared out Windows Media Player. On the one hand, this means that I’ll likely have problems watching trailers at a place like Yahoo!Movies, which is a loss, but I don’t honestly go to Yahoo!Movies very often, meaning that I don’t use Windows Media Player very often, so I’d say that negates any loss. If anyone knows of an alternative media player that will play the odd .WMV file, though, let me know.<\/p>\n I’m planning to replace Word with AppleWorks, which came bundled with my iMac. AppleWorks can open the Word files I already have, is more user-friendly as Word, and appears to be just as fully-featured. I had planned to switch to the OpenOffice.org suite<\/a>, but they still don’t have a Mac OS X native version. I’d have to use X11 which isn’t a problem except that the last time I used OpenOffice in X11 it didn’t look very good. Yes, the Quartz engine has made me a snob about anti-aliased fonts. On the other hand, OpenOffice saves its files in XML… I’ll play around with AppleWorks and OpenOffice and see which one I like better. Other suggestions are, of course, welcome.<\/p>\n Entourage and the Hotmail account will be the trickiest to get rid of. I still haven’t found a replacement for Hotmail that I like. Fastmail.fm<\/a> would be nice, except that it’s free account requires you to have an established SMTP server. I need an account that Mail can connect to (so POP3 or IMAP) because I’d like to forward the mail I have archived in Entourage to a new account and, in turn, archive it in Mail. Any thoughts?<\/p>\n That’s it, though. Once I get the e-mail situation sorted out, I’ll be done with Microsoft. I don’t miss it already..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At about ten o’clock yesterday evening I decided that I was done. After realizing that it took my computer longer to load Microsoft Word than any other program (with the sole exception of Photoshop, which took the same amount of … Continue reading