A Geek's Opinion

I have been using pidgin ever since the day I got sick of Windows Live crashing on me and my conversations. It is simple and easy to use. But what is the latest and greatest version like. I will be reviewing v2.5.8.

After you go thought the “next and “I accept frenzy” you are presented with this.

As you can see I have no friends. But anyway, notice how simple and straight forward it is. I also noticed I wasn’t bombarded with “Live today” windows that usually pops up. So far so good. But what about a conversation?

After frantically texting my buds telling them to get their ass online I could test it. Again the simplicity follows through. You just have a menu for Font, Insert and Smile! You can also do files transfers, I won’t need to explain how to get there because it is so simple.

Positives

1. Really simple
2. Really simple
3. Great for people on low end machines.
4. It only uses 12MB ram.
5. You can use every provider from MSN to XMPP.

Negatives

1. Doesn’t have all the flash theme line windows live.

Overall

If you are sick and tied of Windows Live I Strongly recommend this product. Why? It does the job that it is intended for. There is no pop ups and it is stable. I give it a 9/10 and a space on my Recommended Software Page. You can download it here.

For those who aren’t geeks or just don’t know what Open Office is I am here to explain it and review it just for you. Okay?

I find it very surprising to know that not many people are aware off this free Microsoft Office Competitor, Open office. Open office is nearly identical to its competitor Microsoft Office but with a much better price, its FREE.

It is intended for all those people that support open source software and believe that software should be free. For today’s review I will be focussing on the Word Processing part.

If you have some experience in Microsoft Office Word, you should be fine. Sure it may not have all the fancy colours like Microsoft Office 2007 but when you type documents you are not there for the colours are you? But for those fussy people it actually looks decent.

Click on image to get full size.

The word processing product of this free office suite is particularly easy to navigate through. It is nearly identical to Microsoft Office. You could easily use this full time instead of Microsoft Office 2007 and save some cash at the same time.

Click on image to get full size.

The download though might put some people off. It is a 155MB download and there are updates… but I can safely say it is worth the 155MB plus download.

You can download it here.

I have been using Open Office for nearly two years now along with Microsoft office 2007 and I can safely say it does the job it has been designed for, but if you need to make high quality reports on the fly you will still might want to consider Microsoft Office 2007.

Positives

1. Free…
2. It is nearly identical to Microsoft Office in layout and navigation.
3. Does everything Microsoft Office can do, to a certain level.
4. Has a free equivalent for everyone of Microsoft’s offerings.
5. Doesn’t take long to get use to and realise what you have been missing out on.
6. Can save your document as a .doc file.

Negatives

1. No theme software, for those that are looking to make a flash report might have to put in some effort.
2. Updates can get annoying.
3. If you want to save as a .doc file you have to select it manually.
4. Does not support .docx files right off the bat, however you could download word viewer (24.5MB download) that will enable you to copy and paste it into Open Office or you could try this website that converts it for you.

Overall

Well worth the download, really high quality software considering it is FREE and a worthy contended for an office suite. But sadly nothing is perfect. It does lack the support for .docx file types but there are ways you can overcome this problem. But overall it is free software that will leave the fussiest of all us geeks speechless. I rate it 8/10.

Coming up: Google Picasa 3 review.