And for people with older computers, sticking with windows means that your computer will seem noticeably slower with each upgrade.
Even if you use and continue to use windows, you can save lots of money, and avoid the most common hacker attacks by replacing a few key programs with their open source equivalents. You can replace Outlook with Thunderbird, replace Internet Explorer with Firefox, and replace MS Office with Open Office
To create and modify graphics images, you can either spend hundreds of dollars on software like photoshop, adobe illustrator, etc. or you can use free software like the Gimp and Image Magick.Security Issues - viruses and other mailicious software have caused many people massive problems in the past few years. Many of these exploits have been aimed directly at Microsoft products. Outlook and Outlook Express are particularly vulnerable. While this has been a boon to the anti-virus vendors, it has been a major problem for users. One huge improvement you can make without spending a penny is to just stop using Outlook. Any Outlook specific attacks will simply have no effect on Thunderbird.
Internet Explorer presents similar concerns. A basic problem is the fact using a browser, an email program and an operating system all created by the same company provides a known set of programs for mailicious software to attack.
Why I prefer Thunderbird for email
- Spam Filtering - Thunderbird has an adaptive filter that you train to recognize spam. As spam messages arrive, with one click you can have that message moved out of you inbox and inform thunderbird that any similar messages should be considered junk and automatically removed from your inbox.
- Security - many worm and virus attacks are directly aimed at Outlook, these mailicious exploits do not work against Thunderbird. And, if there is a problem with Thunderbird it gets fixed fast - for example, there was a problem with Thunderbird that was fixed the same day the problem was announced. Sometimes it takes MS months to fix security holes.
Why I prefer Firefox over Internet Explorer
Note some of what is below is out of date. Although I still prefer firefox, or chrome when I use a windows machine, I must admit that Microsoft has made significant strides in becoming more standards compliant. Of course, since I use linux most of the time, IE isn't an option, so I am more used to other browsers and tend to stick with the browsers that are available on all of the systems I typically use.
- CSS support - firefox supports cascading style sheets far more completely than Internet Explorer. Microsoft keeps refusing to include support for style sheets. If you are using a browser with style sheets, then the menu on this page will remain in the upper left of your browser window when you scroll the screen. With Internet Explorer the menu scrolls off the screen with the rest of the content when the screen is scrolled. This is one of the things that bothers me most about internet explorer, CSS is a very nice innovation which would be much more widespread and much easier to use if Microsoft would just support the standard developed by the world wide web consortium.
- PNG support - PNG is a new, improved specification for image files. It provides many features that GIF and JPEG files do not support. A major feature of PNG files that internet explorer does not support is transparency. With a browser that does support transparency you can create an image that has variable transparency. This feature is not supported by microsoft even though it has been an international standard for years now.
- The biggest reason is that because IE doesn't follow standards it is often necessary to modify the way web pages are written in ways that violate the standards and thereby make the pages look bad when viewed any other browser except for IE. This is a pain for people who create web pages, especially for those of us who don't use windows except for a test machine to see how things look in ie.
