Tech

Technology plays a big part of my personal and professional life.

What I use and recommend.

I never recommend a product or service unless either I or someone I trust has used the product/service.

O/S of choice – Windows 7 / OS X Lion

I used to only recommend 1 OS I recently started to use a Macbook Pro for mobile computing and my Windows 7 workstation when I’m at home.  Both O/S are very mature versions of what each company hope to accomplish.

I can recommend both of them

Browser – Firefox

Still in my opinion the best browser out there for the ease of use, security and the ability with add-on’s to customize your browser to what you want to do.  I also have an install of Google’s Chrome browser just to see the difference with the two main players.

Email & Calendering – Microsoft Outlook 2010

I still use Outlook with Exchange at my day job, but at home I’ve switched to Thunderbird as an email client with Lightning that brings calender and task management to the Thunderbird envoironment.  I switched to this from Outlook about 4 months ago and finding it easier to use with time. After several months I still found that Thunderbird / Lightning were not doing  what I wanted to do the way I wanted to do it.  I’ve moved back to Outlook 2010, which in my opinion is a recommend upgrade from all previous versions.

Other people who’s opinion I trust, prefer just to stick with the Web based Gmail environment.  Other still use Outlook.  This is a case where you can go with any of them.

Office Suite – Microsoft Office 2010 /  OpenOffice

Microsoft Office is a very powerful office suite but most people never use all the features.  For most people OpenOffice will do everything they need to do and is compatible with Word and Excel, I’ve been using documents between both suites and have not run into any issues yet I have found some features that MS Office provides but Openoffice either does not or it takes more steps to get the desired result. Both products I can still recommend.

Build Tool – Ninite

One of the longest steps about rebuilding a PC is reinstalling all the common software you use.  Ninite makes that process much easier, go to their website, select the apps you want and download the installer it gives to you. You run the installer it goes out and grabs the software all without your intervention. I’ve used it on several PC’s here and several friends have used it as well. Recommended.

PDF Viewer – Foxit Reader

Good pdf viewer without the bloat of Adobe Acrobat

PDF Writer – Primo PDF Writer

Great tool to create PDF’s.  Free for personal use.

More to come.