No, I am not selling anything. I know a good product when I see it. You might be aware that OpenOffice has long been a credible FREE replacement for Microsoft Word©. Now there is a new office suite that merits consideration: LibreOffice. It is another FREE[1. FREE, as in no cost whatsoever] productivity suite that includes the six standard applications: Writer, Calc, Base, Impress, Calc, and Draw. Unlike Microsoft Word©, LibreOffice 3.3 is cross-platform–there are versions available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

I have been using LibreOffice 3.3 on my computer, at work (Linux, of course), for a couple of weeks. I highly recommend it. There’s a great article about LibreOffice 3.3 in the online version of Linux Magazine.

I really don’t see the logic in installing Microsoft Windows , when there are so many good distributions of Linux out there. Anyway, at the request of a close relative, I’m installing Microsoft Windows from a “reinstall” disk. This is actually a fresh installation over a previous installation that could not be resurrected due to a lost password. The process, of course, is simple since it is just installing onto a machine that the disk was custom designed to handle. I wonder what I’d face, if I’d bought an off the shelf copy of Windows Vista to install on this laptop. But I digress. After installing the OS, I began the tedious task of installing the updates online. Again, it seems pretty simple, but extremely tedious. The whole process takes hours.