Essential Pieces Of Free and Open Software for Windows. Recently, I received a fresh new laptop from Dell. Upon receiving it, I did the traditional installation of Windows from scratch on it to remove a lot of the garbage that is preinstalled on Dells. Then I got really busy installing tons of great software that takes care of pretty much every software need I have. Not only was all of the software free, every piece of it was open source, which means that the code is peer reviewed no spyware here What follows is a list of thirty pieces of software that are the cream of the crop of open source software for Windows. Not only is every piece of it free, almost all of them directly replace expensive software packages. Now, if only there were an open version of The Sims 2, I might go the whole way and switch to LinuxThirty Free and Open Software Programs Worth Downloading. Replaces Internet Explorer. If you havent switched to Firefox for your web browsing needs, do it now. It stops annoying popups and it has tons of amazing plugins that can make surfing the web even better. I could evangelize all day about Firefox, but one things for sure the first thing I do on any new Windows machine is run Internet Explorer just long enough to download Firefox. Replaces Microsoft Outlook or Eudora. Thunderbird is an email client that has five big things going for it its free, its full featured, its lightweight and runs quick, it has an unparalleled spam filter, and it protects you from those ridiculous phishing attacks by clearly indicating which emails send you to a bogus website. If youre not already using a web based email solution, Thunderbird should be your client. Replaces Microsoft Outlooks calendaring functions. Might as well get the Mozilla trifecta out of the way by mentioning Sunbird, which is the Mozilla Foundations calendaring program. Its extremely easy to use I figured out everything I needed in a minute or two and easy to share your calendar with others. I consider a calendaring tool to be essential if youre using a laptop, and this is no different. Replaces Microsoft Word. Recently, I received a fresh new laptop from Dell. Upon receiving it, I did the traditional installation of Windows from scratch on it to remove a lot of. Internet Icons Download 263 Free Internet Icon Page 2, png icons, free icons. Jabber Folder Icons' title='Jabber Folder Icons' />Want a good word processor but find Microsoft Word too expensive Abi. Word is my favorite replacement for Word. Its lightweight meaning it runs quickly and includes pretty much every feature that I use regularly in a word processor, plus it can save files in formats that you can exchange with Word and Word. Perfect users, plus open any of their files, too. Replaces Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Power. Point. If you want to replace the rest of the Office suite, your best bet is Open. My Diary Download Android. Office. It includes very nice replacements for Excel and Power. Point and workable replacements for Access and other Office elements. In fact, I actually prefer their Excel and Power. Point replacements to the real thing. Replaces Norton Anti. Virus or Mc. Afee. Clam. Win is a slick anti virus software thats quite easy to manage and is unobtrusive while keep your system free of viruses. Thats pretty much all I want from a package, so why pay money for Mc. Afee to keep bugging me all the timeReplaces AIM, Windows Messenger, etc. This is a very clean instant messaging program that allows you to be on AOL Instant Messenger, Windows MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger simultaneously with one program. There are other free packages that do this, but Gaim is stable and clean and simple. Original but essential. From their website, Bit. Torrent is a peer assisted, digital content delivery platform that provides the fastest, most efficient means of distributing, discovering, and consuming large, high quality files on the Web. Our mission is simple to deliver the content that entertains and informs the digital world. In other words, Bit. Torrent allows you to download large media files and also use your bandwidth to help others download these files. Search for media files you want and download em. Replaces Adobe Photoshop. This is a version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program that does a pretty solid job of imitating Adobe Photoshop a regular user of Photoshop like me can adapt to it quite quickly. Its very richly featured and runs quite well in fact, I see no reason to ever go back, even if Photoshop were free. Replaces Lime. Wire, Bear. Share, etc. Sure, Lime. Wire and Bear. Share are free, but why not just get the same basic software without all of the spyware Gnucleus is pretty much identical to those software packages but without all that extra junk that slows down your computer. Replaces Windows Media Player, Quicktime, Real. Player, etc. If you get tired of having tons of media players on your computer, get this package that runs pretty much every media type youll run across without breaking a sweat. Unique but essential. Juice lets you effortlessly subscribe to podcasts, organize them, and listen to them at your convenience. In conjunction with Pod. Nova, I find it easier to use Juice to organize podcasts than using i. Tunes itself. Unique but essential for someIf youre interested in recording your own podcast or just want to make your own voice recordings for whatever reason, Audacity and a microphone are pretty much all you need to get the job done. Im not much for podcasting lets just say I dont have a radio voice, but I use Audacity for other voice recording purposes. Unique but essential. RSSOwl is one of many open source RSS readers. In other words, it enables you to use one program to keep track of the content of a lot of different blogs if you read a lot of blogs, its the only way to keep tabs on all of them without devoting hours jumping from site to site. If you have a laptop, its preferable to using sites like Bloglines, but if youre on a desktop, a web based feed manager might be better. Replaces Win. FTPMany people occasionally have a need to FTP files to other computers if you ever have the need to transfer files in such a fashion, File. Zilla will do the job slickly and quickly. Unique but essential. Keynote is basically designed specifically for the task of taking notes on a laptop. If you ever find yourself in a meeting or a presentation with your laptop open and want to jot down notes and organize them just a bit, Keynote is unquestionably the program for you. Its not good at quality word processing, but thats not the point. In my professional work, I find myself using Keynote almost as often as any other utility. Replaces i. Tunes. If youre not already committed to downloaded music from the i. Tunes Music Store, then Musik. Cube is the best choice available for a music organizer and player. It organizes your mp. Unique but essential. Handbrake enables you to stick a DVD in your DVD drive and have the contents of that film stored to your hard drive in a form that can be read by pretty much any media player. I often use it to put a few movies on my laptop for travel purposes, so I dont have to worry about keeping track of DVDs while on the road. Replaces m. IRCX Chat is a free IRC client. For those unfamiliar with IRC, its a place for technical people and, as my wife loves to point out, nerds to meet and discuss topics in an open environment. I often find it very useful when piecing through difficult technical issues. Unique but essential. How To Install Adobe After Effects Cs4 Crack'>How To Install Adobe After Effects Cs4 Crack. Kee. Pass is a program that securely stores and manages the abundance of passwords we all use on a daily basis. I have literally hundreds of usernames and passwords spread out all over the place Kee. Pass keeps them all for me and keeps them safe. Unique but essential. How to Deal with a MiscarriageIm sorry, theres no heartbeat, my doctor said to me. She didnt sound very sorry, leaving the room so quicklyostensibly so I could pull up my underwearthat she couldnt hear me burst out in tears. There are many ways to lose a pregnancyfrom the traditional bleeding in the toilet, to a missed miscarriage where you dont even know that you miscarried, to a blighted ovum where the baby never started growing at all, to an ectopic pregnancy, where the fetus implanted in the wrong place. Ive had most of themthey all suck, let me tell youand Ive learned the important ways to deal with a miscarriage. Chances are you were told in school that you could get pregnant any time you have sex so dont have Read more Read. First, you will probably be in shock. No matter how nervous you were about becoming a mom, no matter how skeptical you were of the pregnancy working out, you will be disappointed times a million. And as awful as this all issad and frustrating and emotionalthe first thing you have to do is figure out how to start or complete the miscarriage process. There are a number of ways to terminate a failed pregnancy and Ive done most of them. Naturally. This means you just let nature take its course. You wait for the bleeding to start and for the pregnancy to pass. For very early pregnancies, like chemical pregnancies which never registered a heartbeat, this is often the recommended route. My very first miscarriagewhere I didnt really know I was pregnant until the prior daypassed this way, and it felt like a really late period. Had I not taken three pregnancy tests, thats what I would have assumed it was. Some women prefer to do the natural way no matter how far along in their first trimester they are, but the downside is that you could be waiting a whilewhich totally creeped me out in my second miscarriage, knowing there was a non living fetus inside of me. Also, it could be super messy ditto on the creepy. And it can also be incomplete, sending you to surgery anyway see 3. The Pill. There is a pill that can help the miscarriage proceed fasterespecially if it already started. Misoprostol, which induces labor and for miscarriages is often given together with Mifepristone also can be messy and from what Ive heard, extremely painful. I was advised not to use this because you often end up in surgery anyway see 3. Surgery. As you can see from my previous two conclusions, I am a big fan of the surgical procedure to terminate a failed pregnancy, specifically the D C. I am not a doctor, so I cant give any medical advice except to tell you there are risks to every surgery. But as a patient, by my third miscarriage, I preferred this method of removing the contents of the uterus, usually under general anesthesia. There is a surgical procedure called aspiration which involves a vacuum and no general, but I found it awful to be awake, making conversation and watching everything happening. An ectopic pregnancy must be surgically removed. Heres why I preferred the D C Your pregnancy is terminated quickly and painlessly, for the most part. Ea Sports Cricket Roster File Download. You dont have to witness any of the sad bloodshed. It is the most effective way of making sure everything is removed and to get you ready for your next pregnancy. MOST IMPORTANTLY and I cant stress this enough so Im going to give it a separate headline. Get It Tested. If you have surgery you can get what is medically called the products of conception tested. That means they can chromosomally test your fetus and see what, if anything, was wrong with it. For older patients, patients undergoing IVF, or in my non medical opinion, any patient, it is a great comfort to find out that something was wrong with the fetus, which is why it didnt make it. On the other hand, if they find out that there was nothing wrong with the babythat it was chromosomally normalyou can investigate other solutions to prevent it from recurring. In fact, Im such a fan of this method that by my 4thand finalmiscarriageI scheduled it right away so I could make sure not to lose my chance to test the products. Moving On. Its only after youve dealt with ending the miscarriage that the real loss may hit you youre not pregnant anymore. The sadness of this will be accompanied by actual physical symptoms, such as a drop in hormones those happy making chemicals that buoyed your bump. I myself often experienced a palpable gut wrench from the drop, as well as a weight gain that no doctor had warned me about. Look, Im not going to sugar coat this There was no good thing about any of my miscarriages. And most people didnt have any good things to say about it either, like, At least you can get pregnant. Thanks a lot. But maybe the one good thing that can come out of this is that I suffered through indecision and different procedures so you dont have to. Hopefully you can get through the physical part, so youll be free to focus on emotional healing and hopefully, get started trying again.