« Return to: Keep It Simple
| INSTEAD OF ... | you could use... | and save yourself... | Comments |
| Microsoft Office | OpenOffice | $300, 200MB of storage, and 128MB of RAM | OpenOffice, a completely free alternative, lacks the security problems, assistants, and background apps Microsoft Office brings along. |
| Windows Media Player | Quintessential Player | from having to deal with the constraints of digital rights management | The Quintessential Player can play any video or audio file format except QuickTime and Real. |
| Internet Explorer | Mozilla, Opera, or any other browser | from the danger of ActiveX and security flaws that let spyware and worms get on your PC | Internet Explorer might get patches to fix its many bugs, but repairing our trust in the browser will take longer. (Visit PCWorld.com's Downloads.) |
| McAfee VirusScan | AVG Anti-Virus | $50 to $70 to purchase the software, and $20 to $30 a year for renewals | AVG is an award-winning, simple, powerful, and utterly free antivirus program. |
| Norton Internet Security | ZoneAlarm 5 | $70 | With free firewalls like this, who needs to buy one? |
HOW WE TEST: We test rewritable DVD drives under Windows XP Home on PCs with 1.67-GHz Athlon XP 2000+ processors and 512MB of DDR SDRAM. To test each drive, we use the bundled DVD video authoring, mastering, and packet-writing software; we use vendor-supplied media or Verbatim media. Tests conducted by the PC World Test Center. All rights reserved.