I recently bought (another) computer from my dad.  He works at a university which every few years recycles their “old” computers by selling them at a very discounted rate.  I bought a P4, 3 Ghz, 1 GB Ram, 250 GB Hard Drive with a LCD monitor for $230! Not that bad.  Now I am in the lucky position of having two computers.  I have to admit that this is a nice convenience to have.  For instance, when my wife or kids wants to get on one computer, I can still get some work done on the other computer.  One thing that I noticed lately is that the biggest difference between these two computers isn’t their performance difference as much as the difference in the cost of the programs loaded on the computer.  You see, computer #1 has been loaded with the all the brand-name and expensive software packages while on the other hand, I installed open source and free software on the new computer.

I took a few moments this morning to create a very basic table showing you how much money you can save by using free open source software versus expensive commercial packages.

Type of Software Computer #1 Cost Computer #2 Cost
Photo Editing / Graphics Design Adobe Photoshop CS3 $299 Paint .Net Free
FTP Program CuteFTP 8 Professional $90 FileZilla Free
Text Editing EditPad Pro $99 Notepad ++ Free
Photo Organizing ACDsee Pro 2 $129 Picasa Free
Sound Editing (for podcasting) Adobe Audition 3 $349 Audacity Free
Video Editing Sony Vegas Pro 8 $549 Windows Movie Maker Free
HTML / Web Development Microsoft Expression Web $299 KompoZer Free
Email Office and Outlook 2007 $399 Thunderbird Free
Office Productivity Suite Microsoft Office 2007 $399 OpenOffice Free
Operating Software Windows Vista Home Premium $259 Windows XP (OEM) Free
Total Cost $2871 Free

As you can see, you can save yourself a significant amount of money by searching for some free alternatives to expensive software packages like the ones listed above. They may not have all the features of the professional grade, but if you are like me, you don’t need most of the bells and whistles of the commercial programs anyway.  When I am switching back and forth between the two computers I hardly ever catch myself saying, “I can tell that this is a free program”  In fact, many times I find myself wanting to use the free and open-source programs because they don’t take as much memory and run faster when you have a lot of applications open.

Lesson:  Don’t install and purchase bloated expensive commercial grade programs when you can find great alternatives for FREE!

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