My ISP offers secure AIM (encrypted, as opposed to the really loud and potentially audible yelling across the ocean that most of us are doing now) as an experimental service, *not* limited to their own customers. The instructions are in Dutch, but also short and to the point, so I'd be willing to be help there if you want to try it. If you want to cut your teeth on Dutch, the info is here (http://www.xs4all.nl/allediensten/experimenteel/jabber.php). ;)
I like roughdraft (shareware) for writing, it's a very simple text editor with lots of lovely features for writers (auto-saving notes in separate file but same window, good search and replace, multiple clipboards, that sort of thing). It save in Rich Text & plain text.
Open Office is free, but when generating .doc files it wasn't *completely* compatible with MSWord when using indexing & things like that (same goes for macros in the Excel equivalent). Note that it was a while back, so I don't know how it is now.
I like the Opera Browser, but I've heard really good things about Firefox too.
Ooh! Yes, big one: Zoom Player is the best player for .avi & .mpeg and the like that I've seen. It's free, and the same files look better in zplayer than they do in mediaplayer or any other that I've tried. It also plays DVD's --*also* with better image quality. Impressed marycrawford no end when she saw the difference. It just does the image decoding better, I think. Find it here (http://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_download.shtml). I've occasionally had to search for and add codecs (which is very easy), but it plays pretty much every file I want it to.
Oh, and the biggest one of all: Zonelabs (www.zonelabs.com) Zonealarm firewall. It is really, really, really good stuff. Note that it's free for personal use, though you have to be sure to check the right version in the download dialogue (though I think the pro version will revert to the free version anyway).
This site (www.grc.com) will show you how open to attack your computer/network is without it, on this page. (https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2) They also have some other nifty tests worth checking out.
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Date: September 23rd, 2004 03:42 pm (UTC)I like roughdraft (shareware) for writing, it's a very simple text editor with lots of lovely features for writers (auto-saving notes in separate file but same window, good search and replace, multiple clipboards, that sort of thing). It save in Rich Text & plain text.
Open Office is free, but when generating .doc files it wasn't *completely* compatible with MSWord when using indexing & things like that (same goes for macros in the Excel equivalent). Note that it was a while back, so I don't know how it is now.
I like the Opera Browser, but I've heard really good things about Firefox too.
Ooh! Yes, big one: Zoom Player is the best player for .avi & .mpeg and the like that I've seen. It's free, and the same files look better in zplayer than they do in mediaplayer or any other that I've tried. It also plays DVD's --*also* with better image quality. Impressed
Oh, and the biggest one of all: Zonelabs (www.zonelabs.com) Zonealarm firewall. It is really, really, really good stuff. Note that it's free for personal use, though you have to be sure to check the right version in the download dialogue (though I think the pro version will revert to the free version anyway).
This site (www.grc.com) will show you how open to attack your computer/network is without it, on this page. (https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2) They also have some other nifty tests worth checking out.