My laptop is dieing. The "i" key sticks, so that sometimes when I type fast, it doesn't register and words like "Bikini" look like "Bkin" when I look back at what I've typed. The battery is now dead, so I can only use it when it is pugged in. The light that tells me when the bluetooth is on has burndt out. And since it it 7 years old, it is too slow to run my favorite video game.
With that inmind, I bought a new netbook at Walmart for only $220. It won't play video games, but it is perfect for surfing the web and writing my books. The only problem is, it doesn't come with Microsoft Office preloaded. For $120, I can download them, but that's a good chunk of change.
So I go online, and look for alternatives. Wordperfect is even more expensive, so I rule that one out.
Then I find
OpenOffice. It's free, and word compatible. I had heard of OpenOffice before, but had never seen it. Reading through the description, it's exactly what I need. It also has the equivalent of powerpoint and excel built into it. I download it, and fire it up. I open up my latest book, which I had saved in Word format, and there it is. I type a bit, hit the save key, and it saves to Word format.
Call me a convert, no more buying overpriced Microsoft software for home use.
You can download it here:
http://www.openoffice.org/.
