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Disasterware?

Most shareware is great, but bad apps can hurt a PC. Here's what readers say--and what to do.

Tom Mainelli

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Worth the Hassle?

The occasional headaches are also worth it to school IT manager Leppington, who is considering a free download of Linux for his school's 42 computers. He's also experimenting with Sun's StarOffice and with an open-source word processing program called AbiWord as alternatives to Microsoft's pricey Office suite.

Many top-notch shareware and freeware programs never cause users a minute's worth of extra trouble. But if you're considering downloading software from the Internet, it's clearly a sensible practice to do your homework first (to determine whether there might be compatibility problems, for example) and to discuss your proposed downloads with your favorite IT person.

Finding exactly the right piece of software online--one that does just what you need it to do, either for free or at a price you can easily afford--can be exciting and exemplifies the best of the Internet.

But stumbling on a program that causes system problems or that shares your personal information with somebody else can make you wish you'd never heard the words freeware and shareware.

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