After a lot of searching and a ton of trials of different pieces of software, I’ve found nine pieces of free software (both open-source and otherwise) that I use every day on both my Mac and for Linux – and all of these are available for Windows as well. With only a few little exceptions, these software packages are the only ones I use during a given day. I will also say that in many cases, I have donated to the creators of the software – my belief is that you should support what you actually use, and I certainly do use these pieces of software.

Let’s dig in!

Firefox
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

My web browser is my primary tool, and Firefox is unquestionably the best option available to me for cross-platform use. It’s stable, fast, and runs every web application and web site that I need without a bit of worry. (Yes, I’m aware that Opera is an excellent browser as well – I just haven’t felt a compelling reason to switch.)

If you’re still using Internet Explorer, I beg you – give Firefox a try. Fewer security issues, fewer popups, and fewer hassles all around.

Key web applications I use through Firefox include Instapaper (a nifty way to save things I want to read later), Evernote (keeping notes; see below), Remember the Milk (checklists), Gmail (email), and GCal (calendars). I keep these sites on the bookmark bar on both my Mac and on my laptop, so the tools I need are available in both places

Evernote
http://www.evernote.com/

I use Evernote for pretty much all my text editing, not only on my Mac and my laptop, but on my iPod Touch as well and also on my parents’ Windows PC. Evernote is basically just a tool to keep notes synchronized across computers. You create a new note, save it, and then you can see it (and edit it) on any other computer with a web browser. Even better, notes can be little pieces of text, web clippings, voice recordings, or pictures. My notes are a mix of post ideas, things to think about, post drafts, and tons of other things – I literally have hundreds of notes at any given moment.

So why do I list this as a separate application? On Macs and Windows PCs, you can download a separate piece of software that allows you to do the same thing much more cleanly and offline, so that I can continue to edit notes and add new ones if the internet is out. When I’m on my Mac, I use the desktop client – when I’m on my laptop or any other computer, I use the website.

iTunes and Juice
http://www.apple.com/itunes/ and http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/

Listening to music isn’t that big of a deal – I have a pile of mp3s on both computers, but I often listen to radio stations via the web browser. My big concern is podcasts (for those unfamiliar, podcasts are basically short “talk radio”-style programs you can listen to whenever you want) – I listen to a number of podcasts and I like to be able to access them anywhere.

On my Mac (and on Windows, too), I use iTunes for this. It’s incredibly easy to just browse the podcasts available on iTunes, pick the ones you want, and iTunes will just download them for you so you can listen to them as you please. On Linux, I use Juice for much the same effect, though it’s a bit more difficult. I usually find interesting podcasts on my Mac, then subscribe to them later using Juice. This lets me listen to the podcasts I enjoy wherever I am.

Skype
http://www.skype.com/

I use Skype for both voice chatting (i.e., telephone calls) and video conferences with friends and family on both my Mac and my laptop. You can do this for free to other Skype users or make unlimited calls to phone numbers in the US and Canada (plus an hour’s worth of international calls) for just $2.95 a month. Videoconferencing works like a charm with Skype, which has been essential for some of my work-related opportunities, plus it’s fun to talk to family using it so they can see the kids and so on. It costs nothing if you do this with other Skype users – talk about a good deal!

I waxed ecstatic about Skype in the past – while it hasn’t replaced our phone service as of yet, I use it much more than our normal phone service at this point.

Tweetdeck
http://www.tweetdeck.com/

I’m a Twitter addict. I don’t tweet that much myself, but I follow a small handful of people and love to dive into random conversations on topics that interest me. You can do Twitter via their website, but I often find it cumbersome to do this kind of thing, plus it’s easy to get massively overloaded with people who update too much.

So, I’ve been trying out Twitter clients that help with those problems, and the best one I’ve found (by far) is Tweetdeck. The big feature is “grouping” – I can define my own groups of people on Twitter and just pay attention to that group, like “Personal Friends” or “Interesting Thinkers” or “Fellow Money Bloggers.” This lets me follow certain sets of people closely without getting flooded with minutiae too much. I can also easily search Twitter for topics of interest, browse through conversations on those topics, and dig into conversations to my heart’s content. Yep, I’m a Twitter addict – and Tweetdeck makes it very easy to do what I like.

OpenOffice
http://www.openoffice.org/

Quite often, I need to edit and share documents with friends. I also use spreadsheets to keep track of my money, plus I use presentation software as I begin to engage in speaking opportunities. For most people, this means ponying up for Microsoft Office, but OpenOffice does all that for free – and it works almost identically on my Mac and on Linux (and on my parents’ PC).

OpenOffice includes document creation, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, basic drawing tools, and lots of other little bits – and it doesn’t cost a penny.

Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

I’ve been experimenting with podcast recording for a while now, trying to figure out what I want to do and how I want to do it. At times, I’ve recorded at my desk and on my laptop using a USB microphone. In both cases, I’ve found that Audacity does everything I need to do – I can edit pieces together, add music snippets, move pieces around, record from the mic, and it all just works.

I tried using GarageBand on my Mac, but it often felt like using an elephant gun when a peashooter would do the trick. Other solutions I tried crashed or had stability issues. Audacity just does the trick whether I’m at home or on the road.

Freemind
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/

What is Freemind? Freemind is basically a workspace where you can jot down little pieces of ideas, connect them together, and organize them really easily. I use this whenever I’m trying to figure out how to organize my ideas for a complex post. Where it is really shining right now, though (and I’m using it a lot lately), is for putting together the basic framework for my next book. I can just take little ideas (keywords or phrases) and move them around in groupings and connections however I wish.

Freemind makes all of this easy. If you’re trying to put together a complex idea, it can be truly invaluable. Better yet, it works on tons of different platforms – I use it on both of my machines and I’ve used it on PCs in the past. If you do creative work or are dealing with a large project, give it a shot.

BOINC
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

BOINC? BOINC doesn’t really do anything, but it runs more than any other program on both of my computers. To put it simply, BOINC takes your unused computer cycles and contributes them to large research projects, like SETI@home or protein folding. For example, when I’m working, I’m usually not using much of my computer’s processing power – text editing doesn’t really eat up the processor, you know. So I keep BOINC running, and it uses those wasted resources and puts them toward a good cause. It’s a way to be charitable with something you would otherwise completely waste. I run it constantly on my Mac and (when I think of it) on my laptop when it’s plugged into a wall socket.

BOINC keeps track of your progress and lets you see your contributions to whatever projects you choose (I usually contribute to SETI@home). It’s kind of fun to look at the data I’ve helped to analyze and realize that I’m helping a large scientific project go forward – and it only costs me a few pennies in electricity.

One final note… one free application I used almost constantly for Windows was Digsby. It allowed me to keep track of updates on every instant messaging service I use, most of the social networking websites (like Facebook and Twitter), and emails, too. Unfortunately, it’s not yet available for Mac and Linux, so I’m still waiting… but for all you Windows users, this one’s great.

Since I have a nice desktop machine in my office and I can do quick web browsing and reading of email on my iPod Touch (a wonderful Christmas gift, I must say), a netbook isn’t really a need at all. It would just be convenient, enabling to do some things out of the house that I couldn’t otherwise do.

At the same time, I had an old laptop in my closet. It’s several years old and it really struggles running Windows Vista – I had thought about downgrading it to Windows XP, but I never really bothered because of another problem. The laptop’s battery was completely shot. It would last roughly thirty seconds on battery before simply powering down abruptly.

What I would like to have is a device with a few hours of battery life that starts up quickly and allows me to check my email and a few key sites on the road. Most of all, I’d like to find the cheapest route to get from what I have to where I want to be.

So I put on my frugal thinking cap and got to work.

Fixing the Power Problem
The first step was to solve the power issue – and the way to solve that was to find a new battery for the laptop. A replacement battery from Dell costs $140 – ouch.

Luckily, laptop batteries are a perfect item to shop around for online, as many different vendors sell laptop batteries at widely varying prices. A minute worth of Google searching found a compatible battery for $56.88 and talking to a few parts vendors on eBay by email found another one for $50 including shipping. When you need parts, ask around.

Replacing the battery is trivial – simply unlock the old one, pop it out, and pop in the new one. Most reasonably new laptops follow the same procedure – incredibly easy.

Fixing the Software Problem
This leaves me with the second problem – how can I make this old laptop do the things I want with any degree of speediness? I started up the laptop and it took six and a half minutes from hitting the power button until I was ready to actually do anything.

The easiest option would be to just downgrade the laptop to an earlier version of Windows, but this requires me to have a copy of an earlier version of Windows easily available. Also, older versions of Windows eventually stop being supported with updates, making them a security risk.

Instead, I went in a different direction for a solution.

I simply wiped the entire hard drive on the old laptop and installed Ubuntu on it. Ubuntu is a very user-friendly flavor of Linux that is arguably easier to install than Windows and runs very well on older hardware (not ancient hardware, just older hardware). All I had to do was burn an Ubuntu CD on my desktop machine, install it on the laptop, plug in my network cable on the laptop, and have Ubuntu update itself to all of the latest software and drivers. Boom – everything works like a charm, from the sound to the wireless. It took me about two hours, all told, and most of that time was simply waiting, meaning I walked away and did other things while things got set up.

Best of all, every single significant feature I wanted for my netbook is present here: quick to start up, simple web browsing and email access, the ability to do some writing and a bit of number crunching in a pinch – it’s all right there.

My total cost for all of this was about $60.

How Can I Use This Information?
You’re probably wondering how this is useful to you at all. It’s simple – you can basically do the same exact thing if you just want a simple laptop for checking email and surfing the web. For those tasks, you can easily get away with an older laptop.

So how do you get an older laptop? The easiest way is to simply ask around in your community. If you have a local computer store, stop in and see what they have that’s older (by older, I would recommend a laptop that’s not more than five or six years old and has wireless capability). You can also do some shopping online, but shopping for used computer hardware online is definitely a caveat emptor process.

My recommended method, though, would be to ask around your social network and see if anyone has an older laptop that they’re not using that they’d be willing to sell for cheap or trade. Start with anyone you know who has used a laptop over the last few years. You’ll be surprised how many people have old computer equipment that they’re happy to offload for a pittance.

You’ll probably need to find a new battery for that laptop, so before you invest much money, find out the model number and make sure you can get a battery online for it.

Once you have those pieces, though, it’s usually quite easy to replace the battery and install Ubuntu on it, and once you have that, you have a wonderfully functional laptop that’s perfect for checking email and surfing the web – and it won’t cost you too much at all.

Eventually, though, I switched to using a Mac. And, just as with my PC, I wanted to find a lot of open source software to meet my basic computing needs. I didn’t want to shell out the big bucks for Office or other such expensive pieces of software – I’d already spent enough. So I went hunting.

What follows is a list of twenty five pieces of software that are the cream of the crop of open source software for Macs. Not only is every piece of it free, many of them directly replace expensive software packages.

1. Firefox
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Replaces Internet Explorer and Safari
Safari is a very solid web browser out of the box, but it’s not nearly as extensible or useful as Firefox. With add-ons like Book Burro, FareFirst, and Package Mapping, plus the speed and reliability I’ve come to expect, Firefox is the only web browser for me.

2. Quicksilver
http://www.blacktree.com/
Unique but useful (productivity)
Quicksilver lets you set almost anything you can imagine in Mac OS as a keyboard shortcut. This allows me to do things like start iTunes and have it auto-play a specific podcast with a specific keyboard shortcut (I have one that auto-plays This American Life, for example). It’s a bit complicated at first, but once you get used to it, it makes you feel massively productive and it becomes almost an essential part of the OS.

3. Thunderbird
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
Replaces Mail
For most purposes, the default Mac OS Mail does the trick, but I find Thunderbird essential because it allows me features like auto-replying to certain kinds of messages and far better IMAP support, and it’s faster, too. Even better – it works identically both on my PC and on my Mac.

4. Sunbird
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/
Replaces iCal
I like iCal, but Mozilla Sunbird does one thing that iCal doesn’t – two-way syncing with Google Calendar. When I’m traveling, I’ll use Google Calendar at any terminal I’m at to print out tomorrow’s schedule, make little changes, and so on. When I get home, it’s just a click of a button and it all syncs up with Sunbird. That’s an amazing feature for me and it makes Sunbird far superior to iCal.

5. AbiWord
http://www.abisource.com/download/
Replaces Microsoft Word
This is, by far, the best open source word processor for Macs. It functionally replaces Microsoft Word for almost every purpose I’ve come across and has a fast and slick interface to boot. This is the word processing program I used to write my book with, in fact.

6. OpenOffice
http://www.openoffice.org/
Replaces Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint
Need to make spreadsheets or presentations on your Mac? OpenOffice provides the tools you need for that (as well as word processing, but I prefer AbiWord for that). I often use OpenOffice Spreadsheet for the number calculations you see on The Simple Dollar, as well as using it for tracking my net worth (as in this tutorial I wrote).

7. Seashore
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/
Replaces (for most uses) Adobe Photoshop
This is a fairly simple image editor that takes care of most of the basic uses of Photoshop and is simple enough for most users to pick up. This is a great solution for those who want to do simple image manipulation but don’t want to shell out the big bucks for Photoshop.

8. Scribus
http://www.scribus.net/
Replaces Adobe Pagemaker (desktop publishing)
I’m actually elbow-deep in Scribus right now as I work on a special side project. It’s a very powerful desktop publishing program, giving you tons of freedom to lay out pages however you like. Another use: I’m thinking about making a family newsletter to ship out in the Christmas cards this year.

9. Adium
http://adiumx.com/
Replaces iChat
iChat is pretty slick, allowing me to chat in AIM and GTalk at the same time, but what about all of the other chatting protocols out there. Adium allows you to be on YahooIM, Windows Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and several other messaging services at the same time with the same program.

10. OneButton FTP
http://onebutton.org/
Replaces “command line” FTP
On occasion, I need to FTP some files from one place to another (usually from one computer to another within our home network, when I’m too lazy to use a memory stick). OneButton FTP does the job in the simplest and easiest way possible – much easier than the default “command line” FTP.

11. Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Replaces/supplements GarageBand
Need to make audio recordings of your own? All you need is a microphone of some sort and Audacity – and you can create podcasts, record music, or pretty much anything else you can imagine. I’ve actually considered using it to read aloud some bedtime stories for my kids in advance of any traveling I might do.

12. Cashbox
http://www.fadingred.org/cashbox/
Replaces Quicken
This is a very nice personal finance data manager for Mac OS. It doesn’t have quite all the bells and whistles of Quicken, but it provides a strong feature set and a huge number of different views of your personal finance state. If you’re a Quicken fan but don’t want to drop the cash for a Mac version, look into this one.

13. Vidalia
http://www.vidalia-project.net/
Unique but useful (privacy)
Many people are concerned about online privacy and don’t want their IP address shared with web sites that they visit or file servers that they access. Vidalia easily allows you to use proxy servers for your accessing needs, enabling you to disguise your computer on the internet.

14. Books
http://books.aetherial.net/wordpress/
Unique but useful (book cataloguing)
This one’s just for fun, but I’ve found it very useful. It allows you to catalogue all of your books, create reports, and so forth. I’ve been using it heavily in conjunction with PaperBackSwap to help me as I read through a pretty big pile of classic literature.

15. Bean
http://www.bean-osx.com/
Replaces TextEdit
I use this software for the editing of virtually every post that appears on The Simple Dollar. It’s a slick little editor with features like automatic word counting that really help when you’re trying to keep some semblance of control on the length of your articles.

16. GanttProject
http://ganttproject.biz/
Replaces Microsoft Project
This is an excellent tool if you’re involved in the management of large projects with many staff members, particularly if budgeting is tight (as Project can be expensive). One of my closest friends uses this for mission-critical projects in the workplace.

17. Nvu/BlueGriffon
Now: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15699
Soon: http://bluegriffon.org/
Replaces Dreamweaver (HTML editing)
I prefer coding my HTML by hand, but many people prefer the aid of a tool to help them with layout, and that’s what these provide. Nvu is a bit outdated but is still very useful – the creator has moved on to a new project, called BlueGriffon, which should be available soon.

18. Blender
http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
Unique but useful (3D graphics creation)
Blender is a magnificent tool if you like tinkering with 3-D graphics creation. It’s perhaps overkill for most people, but if you’re involved in graphic design at all, using and knowing Blender can be invaluable.

19. Colloquy
http://colloquy.info/
Unique but useful (IRC)
If you chat on IRC, Colloquy is essential software. For the uninitiated, IRC is a very large network of chatrooms on various specific topics, often developing their own culture. Colloquy is a wonderful solution for IRC chatters on Macs.

20. FreeMind
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/
Unique but useful (brainstorming)
Whenever I’m struggling to organize my thoughts and ideas, I open up FreeMind. Basically, it’s a tool that lets you toss out your thoughts in an unorganized structure, then build connections between them however you like. I often use it for posts where I have a collection of thoughts and research notes, but I haven’t really decided how to order them or tie them all together. It’s brilliant in any brainstorming setting.

21. Celestia
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
Unique but useful (planetarium)
If you’re a space buff (like I am), Celestia is incredible software. It’s a great way to create star charts, help you identify good nights for viewing constellations and other stellar objects, and simply stumble around different views of the sky. I simply love looking at the night sky, and Celestia is a wonderful free companion for this hobby.

22. Transmission
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19378
Unique but useful (file sharing)
Many people like to upload and swap their own files with other users, such as live recordings of concerts, recordings of their own performances, free application software, and so on. BitTorrent is one of the most popular protocols for doing this, and Transmission is easily the best of the open source Mac clients for swapping them.

23. MacLibre
http://www.maclibre.com/
Supplements Software Update
Many of these software packages are updated fairly regularly by their authors. MacLibre serves as something of a “Software Update” tool for these things, fetching updates for you and helping you to easily install them with just a click or two. It’s a great way of keeping up to date on software updates for open software on a Mac.

24. Aleph One
http://source.bungie.org/get/
Gaming
Like games like Quake and Half-Life? Aleph One is an excellent open source game in this vein, available for the Mac. The graphics are a bit on the simple side, but online play is quite slick and one can’t argue with the cost.

25. Battle for Wesnoth
http://www.wesnoth.org/
Gaming
The final choice on this list is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme. Battle for Wesnoth presents you with a wide array of scenarios that require you to take turns moving pieces around the landscape, thinking about your moves, and engaging in skirmishes. This one ate up a lot of my hours a few years ago!

What’s A Podcast? How Can I Subscribe?
Most of you are probably already quite familiar with podcasts, but they might be a new thing for some of you, so let’s get everyone up to speed and on the same page on this.

What’s a podcast? A podcast is an audio recording you can download on your computer. Podcasts are much like radio programs (there are also a few video podcasts out there, which are like television programs, but I’m going to focus on audio-only podcasts) except that you control the station – you choose which programs you wish to subscribe to and your computer automatically downloads them whenever a new one comes out. Whenever you want to listen, you just choose which podcast you want to hear and you’re good to go. The name “podcast” comes from the fact that many people download podcasts to their iPods so they can listen to their preferred podcasts wherever they’re at.

How can I subscribe to a podcast? The easiest way for most people to subscribe is through Apple’s iTunes program. Just visit the iTunes Store and then choose “Podcasts” on the left hand menu. They have thousands upon thousands of podcasts listed there – just wander around and subscribe to a few. They’re all free. If you don’t like them, unsubscribe – you’re completely in control.

Seven Money Podcasts I Listen To
I am currently subscribed to seven podcasts that could be described as “money podcasts.”

Planet Money
http://podcast.com/show/89739/
This is probably my favorite podcast out there on money topics. It’s produced by NPR and comes out once or twice every weekday and is between twenty or thirty minutes in length. I listen to roughly 80% of new episodes. For the most part, it focuses on financial current events, but they do a very good job of connecting things like, say, Iceland’s economic crisis to your personal financial situation.

Money Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for a Richer Life
http://podcast.com/show/19720/
This one comes out roughly each week (it’s usually weekly, but occasionally has a “special edition”) and is about seven minutes in length. It’s very “tip” oriented – it usually describes how to do something specific related to your money, such as setting up a 529 for college savings or how to allocate your assets or what exactly a recession is.

Marketplace
http://podcast.com/show/5270/
Marketplace is produced by American Public Media and is just a replay of their daily Marketplace radio program that appears on NPR in the afternoons. It’s about 29 minutes in length and comes out once every weekday. It tends to focus more on economic issues than personal finance, but it often crosses over into focusing on your pocketbook.

Marketplace Money
http://podcast.com/show/95918/
This is very similar to Marketplace, except it has a bit stronger focus on personal finance. It also comes out just weekly, but it’s about 52 minutes in length. They tend to go a bit more in depth with specific stories, which can be good sometimes, but on occasion results in stories that drone on and on.

Your Money Matters
http://podcast.com/show/3920/
This one’s produced by the Wall Street Journal, comes out daily, and is about five minutes in length. It often seems like a very short version of Marketplace Money – a nice little bit of money news. I find it just a bit drier than Marketplace, but it’s still well worth a daily listen.

Vanguard: Plain Talk on Investing
http://podcast.com/show/19731/
This podcast (produced by the Vanguard mutual fund company) comes out roughly monthly and is about ten minutes in length. It mostly focuses on specific advice for investments for different goals – retirement, college, what kind of IRA to choose, and so on. It’s good, solid, useful advice.

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
http://podcast.com/show/17281/
This one comes out very irregularly, though it averages about twice a month. It’s also often larded down with a lot of “game show” noises. It also varies a lot in length, from two minutes to twenty minutes. So what’s good about it? Once you strip away that stuff, there’s usually some very strong information in here. It just doesn’t pop up as new all that often.

Will There Ever Be A Simple Dollar Podcast?
I’ve thought many times about creating my own podcast or video series. If I did one, it would be similar in vein to the Money Girl series – short episodes that focus on a single topic with realistic, useful tips.

Two things hold me back from jumping on board. First, I don’t have the best radio voice. I don’t know how to describe it, but it doesn’t sound all that great in recordings. Second, I don’t believe a podcast would provide appropriate value for my time. I currently feel like I’m much more likely to reach people with a well-written Simple Dollar post than I ever would with a podcast.

If the right situation came along, I’d be willing to try it, but for now, it’s one of those “back burner” ideas.

If you want this kind of system, here’s how you can get it for usually less than $100.

Step 1: Get the Basic Hardware You’ll Need
Start off by hitting the yard sales and your social network for the basic pieces. What you’re looking for are the basic components of an old PC. You’ll need a monitor, the computer box itself (which should include a CD drive or – preferably – a drive that can read DVDs, too), a keyboard, a mouse, and perhaps some speakers. Many people upgrade their computers on a regular basis, tossing out old monitors that still work or other peripherals they don’t need, so just ask around.

You won’t need much of a computer at all – anything above 1 gigahertz or with more than 384 megabytes of memory will do. I purchased a computer seven years ago with substantially more hardware than that, so it should be easy to find without much expense at all.

Don’t know much about computer specifics? Your best bet is to simply get ahold of the person you know with the most computer knowledge and tell them that you’re looking for the pieces for a very low-end PC.

If you feel more comfortable, you can simply check out Dell or your local superstore and get the least expensive computer that they sell – this way, you can be sure the hardware is new, at least, though you’ll likely spend $200-400 in this case. Once you get it home, though, you should ignore the version of Windows that comes with it and continue below, because on a low-end system like that, Windows will run quite slowly – there is a better way.

This is the only part that will cost you any money at all. The remaining steps won’t cost you a dime.

Step 2: Get the Basic Software You’ll Need
Don’t just install Windows, as Windows will run extremely poorly on that old of a system (and it’s expensive, too). Instead, get a user-friendly version of Linux called Ubuntu. If you have a friend that can burn a few CDs for you, you can download it for free and have your friend make CDs of it. Otherwise, you can request that they mail you a CD of it for free. The free CD by mail takes quite a while, so you might want to get on it if you want to order one.

Don’t let the unknown make you fearful – Ubuntu is easy to use. I would happily install Ubuntu on the computer of even the biggest computer novice without much worry. In fact, Ubuntu is currently running on one of my computers here at home – the only desktop PC in our home is running Ubuntu, not Windows.

When you’ve put together that basic system (plugged the mouse, keyboard, monitor, and speakers into the central unit, then plugged the central unit and monitor into the wall), just put the CD into the CD drive, then power it up. The installation will walk you through the steps – easy as pie.

Remember, even if you have difficulty getting Ubuntu to work, you haven’t invested any money in it at all, so you can always back out and try using something else with no worries.

Once you’re going with it, there’s extensive online help that addresses just about every question you might possibly have on your home computer. If you’re moving to this from Windows, here’s an excellent guide for making that transition, including bringing over all of your web bookmarks, your email settings, and so on. You will probably also want to set things up to allow yourself to play restricted media, like DVDs, mp3 files, and so forth.

Step 3: Get the Other Software You’ll Need
Ubuntu comes with most of the software you need – Firefox for browsing the web, Thunderbird for email, and lots of other software packages. You may also be interested in getting OpenOffice (free word processing, spreadsheets, and so on) and KMyMoney (free money management software, like Quicken).

In fact, the sole reason I haven’t switched to Ubuntu myself is the lack of a good replacement for Adobe Photoshop. There are several applications which attempt to mimic it (and do a solid job), but I use Photoshop for so many purposes that until they release a Linux version, I’m going to be sticking with the Mac/PC world. For almost everyone else, this isn’t really an issue, but I thought I’d clarify my biggest reason for not jumping on board.

In short, if you just want a very basic home PC to check email and browse the web, this is the cheapest way to get one. You can get a fully-functional, visually appealing, and rather speedy home computer for just the cost of a handful of component parts – most of which you can find very cheaply if you hunt around and tap your social network a bit.

What is Skype?
Skype is a service that allows you to use your computer and high-speed internet connection at home to place telephone calls anywhere in the world for a very cheap price. The plan we’re testing, for example, allows us to make unlimited calls within the United States and Canada (both land line and mobile phones) and an hour’s worth of international calls each month for $2.95, plus unlimited free calls to anyone with a Skype account and their computer turned on. If you want to buy an entire year’s worth, you can get a year’s worth of unlimited free long distance in the United States and Canada for $14.95.

It’s not a scam, it’s completely legit. Skype just uses the internet instead of the telephone system to send phone calls.

Wow! Are there any drawbacks?
There are several, and their severity depends on your situation. For us, they’re pretty minor.

First, this service only allows you to make calls out. For calls in, you have to pay for an additional service, called SkypeIn, that gives you a phone number. Calls to that phone number will pop up on your computer like an instant messenger window – you just click answer and you’re good to go.

Second, you need a microphone of some sort to hear your speaking. I originally used an old Bluetooth headset (headphones with a voice mic that connected easily to my computer), then later I started using a webcam for this purpose. The point is you need some sort of microphone to pick up what you’re speaking and speakers or headphones to play it back to you. Yes, this would mean you’d sit at your computer and carry on a conversation near it without an actual telephone. If you want to actually use a telephone-like device, they make those as well, but there’s an additional cost. We have one and it works well throughout our house – it pretty much functions like a normal telephone.

Third, the voice quality is almost always great, but sometimes breaks up. It depends entirely on the quality of your internet connection. I have never had a call break up at all, but others with low-speed connections or poor internet providers.

So what would be a good setup to replace my home phone?
First, you need a high-quality internet connection. If you can’t just get internet without phone in your area, then Skype won’t really benefit you unless you’re making a lot of long distance calls and would just use this to save on long distance. If you can get internet without phone, that’s an even bigger bonus for using Skype – you save money automatically each month. Your internet connection must be a fairly high quality one, though, or else calls will be choppy. One way to try it out is to download Skype and play with the free service to see if it works for you.

Second, you need a method to speak and receive the voice data from Skype. This means either a microphone or webcam and computer speakers or headphones or a wireless Skype phone (like this one). Hopefully, you already have at least one of these options.

Third, you actually need the Skype program and an account there – it’s a lot like instant messenger, so if you can use your instant messenger program, Skype’s not hard to figure out. It’s auto-detected every device I’ve tried to use with it without skipping a beat – I just ran Skype and it identified the items.

Fourth, unless you have a very expensive Skype-only telephone, Skype requires your computer to be on and connected to the internet. That means there is an energy cost. You can mitigate this by using some clever tactics to reduce home computer energy use, but if your computer’s not on, you can’t receive or make calls. That’s a varying-level drawback depending on your lifestyle.

If all of these requirements fit you, Skype can save you quite a bit of money even just on long distance charges or minutes on your cell phone. If you’re around the house and have a strong internet connection, it’s essentially unlimited long distance to the United States and Canada for $14.95 a year – that’s a great bargain.

Are you using it?
Yes, indeed. My wife and I have started using it a lot at home. I’m sold and am ready to drop our land line to use only Skype, but my wife isn’t quite there yet, mostly because it seems like such a strange concept and she wants a longer test period – plus, she’s not used it nearly as much as I have. My calculation is that this drop will save us about $45 a month when we actually go forward with it, which I believe is just a matter of time until my wife is comfortable enough with it (I’m letting her make the call entirely herself, based on her own judgement – she knows I’m ready to switch, so we’ll switch when she’s ready).

Skype is an option well worth considering, especially if you’re a heavy phone user. Each situation is different, but if you have the things necessary (most importantly, a high speed connection at home), you can eliminate a land line and/or save a lot of minutes on your cell phone package by using Skype.

While this is an effective way to use downtime, with just a little bit of planning and forethought, you can make that time spent finding and discovering useful information for yourself and for your career quite a bit more valuable without a lot of additional effort. Here’s the game plan – try out some of these tactics for yourself.

Share information you find.
Let’s say you find a brilliant article on The Simple Dollar (or another site, but I’m sure the best stuff is from TSD). You read it, find things you can actually implement in your own life, and are really inspired by it. That’s a very good thing – it’s the reason you’re surfing the web for such information, right?

You can increase the value of that information even more by sharing it. Think of a person or two who might really enjoy reading that article and send them a link to the article, along with any comments you might have. If they find value in the article, not only will it improve their situation, but some of their positive feeling about receiving that information will be attributed to you, the messenger. I have a few friends who regularly send me brilliant links on a regular basis with their comments – and I really appreciate it. Those people are just web surfing and sending me the good stuff they find, but by doing that, they’re becoming more valuable to me and cementing our relationship.

Ask follow-up questions of the person who distributes the information.
Whenever you receive a really good piece of information, whether it be from finding an article or from someone sending it to you, ask some good questions. Get the person that wrote the article (or the person that sent it to you) to think about it a little bit more. This is another way to provide value – quite often, a well-constructed question opens the door to a whole new train of thought, and it is those new trains of thought that the information economy thrives on.

Whenever I read a good article on a blog somewhere, I leave a comment that says thank you for the information and also either provides specific new information or asks a relevant question. I do the same whenever I get sent a really interesting link – I reply to the email with a nice thank you and also with a question or an additional thought. This usually spurs discussion – and discussion builds connections and relationships.

Build a basic “information page” about yourself, with an email and links to your profiles on any sites you participate on.
Many of you have noticed that on the right hand sidebar of The Simple Dollar, I’ve included links to my twitter and Facebook profiles. That makes it easy for people who read The Simple Dollar and want to see other discussions I’m involved with to quickly jump over there and find out more. More than a thousand people have done so, and many of them have started conversations with me outside of the material on The Simple Dollar. For example, just a few days ago I had a reader discuss The Boomtown Rats (one of my favorite bands) with me for a long while and now we’re swapping records in the mail.

I include these links because it enables people with similar interests to continue the conversation with me if they want to, and that conversation can often build into something compelling (like those Boomtown Rats and Bruce Springsteen records I’ve got coming in the mail). They can also develop into professional opportunities – the conversation about my book deal was started on Facebook when a person from a publishing company contacted me there because of a Facebook message I’d made, but she’d originally found it from The Simple Dollar. Opening more connections made doors open for me.

What about an information page for you? It doesn’t have to be anything fancy at all. Just go to Google Pages and use their templates to set up a basic information page about yourself. Include a way to contact you directly (IM, an email address, whatever you like) and links to your profile on any online discussion forums you converse on, particularly anything that’s relevant to your professional interests (in other words, those where you conduct yourself professionally). You might instead use your blog for this, if you have one, but it’s far from necessary. This lets people interested in you find out plenty more – and that’s a very good thing, as it paints a more complete picture of you and gives them plenty of common interest avenues to contact you.

What about privacy? Some people might not want that information linked – that’s up to you. On the profile itself, you choose what to link. Also, you can use a pseudonym if you want, or you can use your real name (that’ll make it possible for people to search your name in Google and find this information page) – it depends on what your goals are.

If you have something relevant and useful to say, always add a comment with a link back to your information page.
So why build such a page? What use does it have? Well, whenever you leave a comment at The Simple Dollar, there’s a place to put a URL. You can put your information page’s URL in there and leave an intelligent comment, and then later readers will read it and perhaps click the link … and go straight to your profile page. This lets people follow up with you directly or discover your comments and writings and thoughts at other sites.

This way, people find your profile because of your insightful comments, meaning they’re led to your information by something intelligent you’ve written – they’ve already got a positive opinion of you and are likely seeking to contact you with something – or perhaps just to find out more about you to reaffirm their positive opinion.

Join a social bookmarking site…
So how can you combine the value of this information page and the value of sharing links with others? The most effective way is to join a social bookmarking site – a place where people share links, vote up the good ones, and comment on them. There are many good ones out there – Digg is a good one with a technology focus, Reddit has great conversations and a very eclectic mix with a liberal politics and science bent, StumbleUpon caters to a wide array of interests, and so on.

Join one of these sites, set up a profile that includes a prominent link to your information page, and then start commenting and submitting the interesting links you find. If you’re submitting genuinely interesting stuff and making worthwhile comments, eventually you’ll build a following there and people will visit your information page, again making connections that might surprise you.

… but make it truly social.
Of course, the reverse is true. When you’re on sites with comments, visit the profiles of people who submit interesting articles and make interesting comments. If you like what you’ve found, tell them so – and ask what industry they work in and so forth. You might be able to build a very valuable contact in this way.

I’ve heard from many people that this is the purpose of sites like Facebook and LinkedIn – to make good contacts with people. What I’ve found, though, is that most of the time you’re seeing connections between people that aren’t real – they’re not based on anything at all. I’m on both sites, and quite often (esp. on LinkedIn) I have people making links to me that aren’t based in any form of reality.

When you make the connections based on something real – shared intellectual interests – the connections mean a lot more and you’re much more likely to get value out of them. That’s why, even now with a popular blog, I still comment on many sites and contact people who have interesting comments and profiles – there’s value there.

Find and befriend people who share things that really interest you.
How do you find these interesting people? Focus in on topics that are naturally interesting to you. Let’s say you’re on Reddit and you see four links on the front page that are compelling. Go through the comments on those links and then visit the profiles of people who left comments that were interesting and insightful to you. Those are the people you’re seeking – people with intelligence, insight, and common interests with you.

If you do that regularly, you’ll find a group of people who are intelligent and parallel your interests very well. These are the perfect people to reach out to online, because in their real lives they’re likely doing things that are compelling as well. It might lead to professional opportunities, personal opportunities, and who knows what else. I can’t even count the interesting things I’ve found and received because of these connections – at the same time, I’ve helped out many people I’ve found this way, too, even cinching a job for one of them.

Minimize the navel-gazing – no one cares about your cat except for possibly your closest friends.
If you have a personal blog where you write about the drama of your relationship with your girlfriend or you post a lot of pictures of your adorable kittens, you might not want to include this blog in your profiles. Why? This type of information is simply not compelling to anyone but you and your closest friends – certainly not to professional acquaintances and probably not to more casual friends, either.

The same goes for the trail of bread crumbs you leave in your comments in various places. People might be interested in your cat care comments if you’re a vet, but if you’re just in love with your precious kitty, not many people will find that compelling, so resist the urge unless you’re providing information that’s actually useful to others.

It’s fine to post opinions and such, but ask yourself before you post whether or not this information adds any value for anyone else. If it doesn’t, consider carefully whether you should even post it at all – usually, the answer there is no. If you’re careful about that, you wind up giving the impression to others that you’re insightful and useful – and that will encourage people to look more deeply into the thoughts you have to offer.

Save your best resources for future reference in a sensible way – and share this list, too.
Sure, it’s easy to just bookmark any useful pages you find, but eventually one’s bookmarks become so overcrowded that they cease to be useful. Alternately, you don’t save anything at all and then regret it when you realize you could use this useful link or the profile of a particular person.

I use del.icio.us to solve that problem. It integrates with Firefox (my web browser of choice) so that bookmarking a page is just like it used to be, except a window pops up that lets me add tags to the link I’ve saved. This lets me easily sort the links I find – I can tag one with “food” and “chicken” and “lime,” for example, and later on I’ll be able to find it by searching for any of those tags. You can add as many or as few tags as you want to any link you save, and you can save as many links as you want.

I effectively do this sharing with my Weekly Roundups – I just bookmark them and tag them at del.icio.us in my personal account and then share all of them that are relevant here.

You might want to share your link collection on your profile if you’re using something like del.icio.us – you can make some links private if you want so that you’re not sharing personal stuff. It’s just another way to share information with others and it also gives you a bit of the “messenger effect.”

If all else fails and you just want to play a game…
If this is too much for you and you’d rather just play a game online, try choosing one that has a social benefit. Here are two options.

FreeRice is a vocabulary game that donates twenty grains of rice to the U.N. World Food Program for every correct answer you get. It’s a great way to spend some idle time, help feed the world, and become a little more aware of food issues in the world.

FoldIt is a puzzle game where your answers are directly used to solve protein folding problems and advance medical science. This one is quite fun – I’ve been sucked into playing it for hours.

No matter what you decide to do with your time online, remember that you can make it more valuable, both for yourself and for others, and still retain the fun of surfing to interesting sites and learning new things.

Here are eight great tweaks you can try on your own machine. Some of these tips work best for different setups and different types of machines – not all of them will apply to every system. Choose the ones that work for you and give them a whirl – you might just find yourself not noticing a different at all except for the lower energy bill.

1. Plug all equipment into a SmartStrip.
In most home situations, computers are used for a bit of web surfing, gaming, and other miscellaneous work in the evenings for a bit. This often requires the use of a lot of peripherals – everyone flips on their monitor, and most people turn on their printer, their speakers, and so forth. Then, at the end of the evening, they shut things down, but leave all of that other equipment on, sitting idle, just draining electricity. A printer and speakers left idle can easily drain 40 watts.

Thus, most home computer users are well-advised to install a SmartStrip for their home computer setup. A SmartStrip allows you to plug your computer into the “master” outlet and several other devices into the other slots on the strip. Then, whenever the computer is on, the other outlets receive energy – but when the computer is shut off, the power to the other devices is automatically shut off. Thus, when you turn off your computer in the evening, the power is cut to the monitor, the printers, the speakers, the internet router, and anything else that might be a piece of peripheral equipment.

Let’s say your internet router, your printer, and your speakers eat 50 watts just sitting there idle, and having a SmartStrip eliminates that usage an average of 10 hours a day (they’re not sitting on all day when you’re doing other stuff). Over the course of a year, that’s 182.5 kilowatt hours of energy not being used, and with electricity hovering around a dime per kilowatt hour, the strip can save you $18.25 a year, year in and year out.

2. Set up Windows so that it automatically shuts down every night.
Every other night or so, I used to leave my computer on after I went to bed and I wouldn’t notice it until the next evening after I got home from work. That is, until I told it to shut down automatically at two in the morning each night. Here’s how to do it on a Windows PC (it’s really easy):

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
2. Click Performance and Maintenance, and then click Scheduled Tasks.
3. Double-click Add Scheduled Task. The Scheduled Task Wizard starts.
4. Click Next.
5. Under Click the program you want Windows to run, click Browse.
6. In the Select Program to Schedule dialog box, locate the C:\WINDOWS\System32 folder, locate and click the Shutdown.exe file, and then click Open.
7. Under Perform this task, specify a name for the task and how frequently you want this task to run, and then click Next.
8. Under Select the time and day you want this task to start, specify a start time and date for the task, and then click Next.
9. Type the user name and password to run this task under, and then click Next, and then click Finish.
10. In the Scheduled Tasks window, right click on your new task and choose Properties. Select the Settings tab, then check the box that says “Wake the computer to run this task,” then click OK.

That’s it. It’s done. So what do you get out of that? Let’s say your computer uses 80 watts per hour, and your monitor when receiving no signal eats 5 watts an hour (these are rough average estimates). So, every hour your computer is off when it would have just been sitting idle saves 75 watts or so. Now, let’s say that every other night, you forget to turn off your computer and you don’t notice it until you come home from work the next day. That’s about 20 hours of unused energy, or an average of 10 hours a day. Over a year, that’s 3650 hours unused – a lot of time.

Multiplying 3650 hours by 75 watts gets you a big number, about 273.75 kilowatt-hours. An average eletric bill charges about $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, so multiplying $0.10 by 273.75 gets you the amount of money you put right in your pocket just for doing this simple task once and forgetting about it. Thus, over a given year, this tactic can save you about $27.

Even better, this tactic combines very well with a SmartStrip as described in the first tip. If your computer automatically shuts down at 2 AM, so will everything else plugged into the SmartStrip.

3. Tinker with your computer’s energy settings.
Almost all modern computers (Windows XP and Vista and Mac OS X) have a control panel that allows you to set various energy saving options, such as how long before the computer and the display go to sleep during inactivity. Play with these settings and try to find the lowest numbers that are still convenient for your use.

For example, I set all of my settings to an hour (lower than what the defaults were) and found they didn’t bother me at all. So I kept lowering them. Now, my screen saver pops on after three minutes and everything else goes to sleep after five – I’ve found that if I’m away longer than that, I’m usually away for quite a while. A wiggle of the mouse wakes it up, so it’s no big deal.

This can save a ton of energy over the long haul. Let’s say the energy use of my system drops 60 watts when it goes into sleep mode. If these settings cause it to spend two more hours a day in sleep mode, that’s 43.8 kilowatt hours, an automatic savings of $4.38 in a year.

4. Use an efficient uninterruptible power supply, especially for computers you don’t turn off.
I almost never turn off my work computer. To protect it, I use a “green” uninterruptible power supply for it and most of the peripherals.

This has three benefits. First of all, a good universal power supply regulates the energy use of all of the devices plugged into it, minimizing the energy wasted from “switching” from device to device. Using a Kill-A-Watt energy tester, I found that the unit I use uses about five fewer watts than an ordinary power strip with the same devices plugged into it. That’s a non-stop around the clock savings of about 43.8 kilowatts per year, or $4.38.

Second, it also functions like a SmartStrip, with a master outlet and several slaves. I turn my workstation off only for long trips, and the power supply automatically cuts power to my monitor, my printer, my speakers, my external hard drive, and my internet router. All told, these devices use about 100 watts of energy on average, and the strip eliminates about seven days of use for these devices a year. This adds up to 16.8 kilowatt hours per year, or $1.68.

Third, since there’s a battery back-up inside the unit and also surge protection, I’m protected against power surges and short-term power losses. While this is difficult to calculate directly into dollars, if we experience two power losses per year and two significant surges and this device protects my equipment and keeps me from losing data, it’s well worth the investment.

5. Remove all unnecessary peripherals from home servers.
Our home has a shared file server that we all use. It was an older PC that got “recycled” into a new use, but later, when I checked it out with my Kill-A-Watt energy usage meter, I realized it was sucking down a lot of juice. When I investigated further, I realized that there were a lot of things inside the unit that weren’t really necessary.

Thus, I simply removed an old graphics accelerator card, an old DVD-R drive, and an old CD-RW drive from it and observed that the energy use of the unit went down about seven watts. Over the course of a year, since this machine would be in use nonstop, that choice eliminated 62 kilowatt hours of usage, saving me $6.20 per year. Since the server is on a monitor and keyboard switch and is only used for, well, file serving, I also don’t need that equipment for it, either.

6. Put your laptop charger (and other chargers) on a timer.
Around our house, you can find a handful of outlet timers that serve one purpose and one purpose alone – to make sure devices come on for only a portion of the day when they’re needed.

For me, I tend to use my laptop about once a week. The rest of the time, I usually leave it on the charger and forget about it, but that presents two separate problems. First, leaving it on the charger degrades the battery over time. Second, leaving the charger plugged into the wall – with that big old converter box on it – eats energy at a pretty rapid rate. It eats about 50 watts per hour, according to my measurements.

Thus, I just leave the laptop plugged into the charger all the time when not in use, but the charger is plugged into an outlet timer. That outlet timer comes on from midnight until two in the morning, just long enough to make sure the laptop refuels. If I need it on during the day for some reason, I just reach over to the outlet and touch a button – it then stays on until two in the morning and returns to that cycle.

That outlet timer is saving me a lot of money. I estimate that on an average day, it eliminates 15 hours of energy use by that charger, as I just tend to leave my chargers on the outlet for my convenience. At 50 watts, that adds up to a savings of 273.75 kilowatt hours per year, an annual cash savings of $27.38.

7. “Green” your equipment when you replace it – go for EnergyStar 4.0 compliant.
When it comes time to replace your equipment, spend a few bucks extra and make sure you get one that uses minimal energy. Do the research and look for equipment that’s EnergyStar 4.0 compliant, as those specifications are very tight on energy use. An EnergyStar 4.0 compliant computer uses about 25% of the energy that a non-EnergyStar machine could potentially use – that’s a huge savings if you’re using the computer over time, one that pays for the few extra dollars you might have to pay right off the bat.

One big point of savings is the move from a CRT to a flat panel. Many homes are slowly making this move, but with the low cost of flat panels and the huge energy savings, the move will save you money over the long run. The average 17″ CRT monitor uses 150 watts while awake and 30 watts while idle, while an IBM T series 17″ flat panel uses 50 watts while awake and 3.5 watts while asleep on average.

Let’s say, then, that on an average day, your monitor is awake five hours and asleep two hours. The flat panel will save you 553 watt-hours during that day. Over the course of a year, that’s 201.84 kilowatt hours, or a savings of $20.18. I calculated my own usage, and on an average day, my monitor is awake for nine hours and asleep for three. That adds up to 357.52 kilowatt hours over the year, or $35.75. Given the low price of smaller flat panel monitors, it doesn’t take long – just a few years – for the energy savings to pay for the switch.

8. Adjust your monitor’s brightness.
One subtle move you can make is adjusting your monitor’s brightness by playing with the levels until you find the minimal acceptable brightness for your work. The Saving Energy blog found that reducing a flat panel monitor’s brightness from 100 to 0 shaved 12 watts off of the energy use, with an almost identical reduction with CRT monitors.

My monitor, by default, had brightness set at 80, so I started playing around with it until I found a brightness level that worked for me – 25 (this took a lot of experimentation over a number of days). Assuming this relationship is correct, this saves me 7 watts per active hour of use. If I use my monitor nine hours a day with this new setting, I’m saving 23 kilowatt hours each year, or $2.30 per year, for an adjustment I’m completely comfortable with. Even a reduction in brightness of 8, which would save 1 watt, would save 3.285 kilowatt hours per year, or $0.33.

These really add up.
Using these adjustments (at least, the ones that applied best to my situation), I spent about $100 on equipment but shaved about $70 per year of electrical use off of my computer. Over five years, that’s a net gain of $250 – and it’s for changes I basically don’t notice.

How green is it? That $350 in energy savings represents 3,500 kilowatt-hours. Each kilowatt-hour, on average, produces about 2 pounds of CO2 (averaging the numbers I found from a pile of different sources). Thus, these moves not only saved me a net of $350, it also prevented three and a half tons of CO2 emissions. That’s change I can definitely appreciate.

Bonus Tip: Read a book.
For those of you who get most of your information online, why not take a night or two a week, leave the computer off, and instead read a book? You can check one out for free at your local library and there’s absolutely no energy use involved other than a light bulb over your head (which you’d likely have on anyway). There are so many amazing fiction and nonfiction works out there that there’s guaranteed to be something out there that will engross your mind. Take advantage of it. If you can’t think of anything else to read, try The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami – it’s sublime, fun, and will make you think.

What is an electronic financial document system?

Basically, it just means that instead of saving paper copies of your financial records, you save them all electronically, saving only paper copies of the most vital documents. This can save a tremendous amount of space, plus make it much easier than before to find and search through your documents.

Here’s an example: let’s say you wanted to find all of your credit card charges for gas in the last year. With paper records, you’d be going through the filing cabinet for an hour: with an electronic financial document system, you just click a few times and search through a handful of PDF files, retrieving the info you want in just a few minutes.

The benefits of such a system include:

It saves space Having all of your financial documents in electronic form is a lot more space-efficient than having a filing cabinet.

It’s easier to search Finding the specific information you need in an electronic system is much quicker than in a system of file folders, especially if your question is rather esoteric. This is especially true come tax time. To me, this is the true benefit of electronic financial documents.

It’s easier to back up Backing up an electronic system basically involves a blank DVD and a DVD burner (or even a CD and a CD burner for a small archive). That’s a lot easier than a filing cabinet full of photocopies.

On the other hand, the drawbacks of such a system include:

It takes longer to file things away When you get a new document, you have to scan it and add it to the system. This can take substantially longer than merely putting it in the appropriate folder in a filing cabinet. This can be mediated, though, by having an efficient system as described below.

It’s slightly less reliable. Filing cabinets typically don’t have disk errors. The best thing you can do is to make sure you have a paper copy of everything truly vital and also be sure to have plenty of backups.

It’s slightly less secure. You will probably want to have some security on the drive, such as having it attached to your desk with a steel cable or something to that effect, as well as data security software like TrueCrypt. A hard drive is much easier for someone to take than a locked filing cabinet.

What do I need?

Here are the components of the system I’ve set up.

A home computer Yep, that’s the basic piece. A few free USB ports and a CD or DVD burner are also needed peripherals.

An external hard drive Over time, this data will really add up. Plus, you’ll want the ability to easily move this archive to another computer. Thus, I recommend an external USB hard drive for storing this data.

A scanner / printer These may or may not be two separate devices. You’ll obviously also need the software for both.

Adobe Acrobat Standard (not Reader) This is my preferred format for storing the documents. Acrobat does a great job of handling character recognition from your scans, making it possible to do text searches of all of the stuff you scan in. Plus, Acrobat files are quite portable.

Blank DVDs These will be used for backups. I highly recommend monthly backups for all of your data, but especially for this type of data.

How do I do it?

This is a step-by-step example of how I set up my filing system. Your filing system may differ – the important part is that it makes sense to you.

First, I devoted an entire external hard drive to financial storage. This meant that everything on this external hard drive was nothing but financial documents. It connects via USB and is hidden in a locked desk drawer. I get it out when I need it.

On that drive, I created a series of top level folders for each entity I conduct financial business with. I have an IRS folder for my taxes, a Vanguard folder for my investments, an Alliant Energy folder for my electric bill, and so on.

Within each folder, I have a folder for each month. “December 2006″ and so on. Within each of those folders, I store the actual scanned documents with a filename that includes the date I received it as well as a brief explanation of what it is. So, in Alliant Energy / March 2007, I have a scanned copy of the bill I received during that month as well as a copy of my receipt for the online bill pay.

I also have a series of “shortcut” folders based on year. At the top level of the drive, I have a 2007 folder, and under that folders for each month. Inside of each of those folders is a direct alias to all of the folders on the drive for that month. This saves time in searching for documents.

Actually getting the documents in there is simple. I just scan them directly into Adobe Acrobat, save them appropriately, then shred the document. Once it’s shredded, I save the shreddings for campfire kindling (seriously, shredded documents makes for great kindling). I only save documents of vital importance.

Once you are used to the routine of scanning and shredding, it becomes very simple to archive all pieces of financial information that come your way. I am now actually archiving grocery receipts and so forth to make it easy to analyze my shopping habits.

In short, even though it takes a bit of work, it’s well worth the extra effort because of the constant convenience of having your financial information at your fingertips.

Some people have suggested that I look into the T-Mobile Hotspot service, but I’m looking for free wireless. If I get desperate, I know I can turn to a Starbucks or a Borders or a Kinkos if I want to pay for the service, but why pay when you can get it for free other places?

Panera Bread
Speaking of Panera, I make it a regular stop on lazy mornings when I’m on the road. Almost every Panera location in the United States offers free wireless to its customers. Panera’s website offers many more details on their wireless access, along with a restaurant locator. Also, their food prices are quite reasonable for the quality that you receive; it’s a great place to pick up a delicious sandwich and a bowl of soup on a cold winter day.

Caribou Coffee
Most Caribou Coffee locations already have wireless access and according to this press release, they’re in the process of rolling things out nationwide. It also helps that Caribou Coffee has much better coffee than other popular chains *coughStarbuckscough*. You do have to keep buying beverages if you sit there for hours, though, as their access code changes on the hour; thankfully, their prices are fairly reasonable and the coffee is quite tasty.

Courtyard by Marriott
When travelling, I try hard to get into a Courtyard by Marriott if at all possible. Why? The prices are reasonable and every room has wi-fi access. If I’m driving on the interstate and my eyes are starting to get heavy, the Courtyard logo is one that I keep my eye out for. Other chains are starting to offer this, but Courtyard has been offering it everywhere for quite a while and I know from experience that their service is good. Some locations offer only free wired connections, but a Courtyard is a sure bet for finding internet connectivity.

Office Depot
Although it’s not the most relaxing environment, Office Depots almost always have wireless access available. I find, though, that if I go to an out-of-the-way corner, I can usually surf and email for as long as I want and I’m left alone by the staff. Usually, I’m not alone in this endeavor.

McDonalds
A large percentage of McDonalds have free wireless access available to customers. Although their food is sometimes questionable, the coffee is hot, the soda is cold, and you can often find a quiet corner to hide out in. Not all McDonalds have wireless access yet, so you might want to check with their website and restaurant locator first; it tells you whether a certain location has wi-fi or not.

CompUSA
Unsurprisingly, CompUSA offers pretty universal wireless access. The stores usually don’t offer convenient places for browsing, but it works well enough for quick accesses when you’re trying to figure out a product to buy or just want to fire off an email. If you’re in a quiet corner, you can usually stick around for quite a while.

Schlotzsky’s Deli
Schlotzsky’s is a delicious place to eat lunch – plus they have a great free wireless program. If I see one of these places and it’s lunchtime (or especially mid-afternoon and I’ve not eaten lunch yet), I’ll make a beeline for the place. Yum.

Staples
Even though their web sites doesn’t advertise the fact, I almost always find open wireless access at Staples and at CompUSA. Although it’s incovenient for sitting and browsing over a long period of time, it works just fine for a quick stop to send an email or check a website quickly.

Fazoli’s
Another chain that doesn’t advertise their wi-fi but often has access is Fazoli’s. I’ve had so much success with wireless access at these fast Italian eateries that I basically expect them to have wireless, even though their chain does not advertise having the service. Plus, they have unlimited free breadsticks and their food, while not spectacular, is about as good as it gets for fast and cheap Italian.

Apple Store
Many “upscale” malls have an Apple Store, which all have a wireless point in them. I often sit outside of these stores and access the wireless; they seem not to mind (or even notice) inside the store. As with the other computer-oriented chains, they likely have such access so they can demonstrate and test wireless applications to customers. Also note that many upscale malls have wireless in their food courts as well.

If you can’t find any of these chains while on the road, you can always check WiFiFreeSpot before you leave and download a list of hotspots for your use. Although this resource is useful, I find it very worthwhile to just keep my eyes open for specific chain businesses for my wireless access.

What follows is a list of thirty pieces of software that are the cream of the crop of open source software for Windows. Not only is every piece of it free, almost all of them directly replace expensive software packages.

Now, if only there were an open version of The Sims 2, I might go the whole way and switch to Linux…

1. Firefox
http://www.getfirefox.com/
Replaces Internet Explorer
If you haven’t switched to Firefox for your web browsing needs, do it now. It stops annoying popups and it has tons of amazing plugins that can make surfing the web even better. I could evangelize all day about Firefox, but one thing’s for sure: the first thing I do on any new Windows machine is run Internet Explorer just long enough to download Firefox.

2. Thunderbird
http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/
Replaces Microsoft Outlook or Eudora
Thunderbird is an email client that has five big things going for it: it’s free, it’s full featured, it’s lightweight and runs quick, it has an unparalleled spam filter, and it protects you from those ridiculous phishing attacks by clearly indicating which emails send you to a bogus website. If you’re not already using a web-based email solution, Thunderbird should be your client.

3. Sunbird
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/
Replaces Microsoft Outlook’s calendaring functions
Might as well get the Mozilla trifecta out of the way by mentioning Sunbird, which is the Mozilla Foundation’s calendaring program. It’s extremely easy to use (I figured out everything I needed in a minute or two) and easy to share your calendar with others. I consider a calendaring tool to be essential if you’re using a laptop, and this is no different.

4. Abiword
http://www.abisource.com/
Replaces Microsoft Word
Want a good word processor but find Microsoft Word too expensive? AbiWord is my favorite replacement for Word. It’s lightweight (meaning it runs quickly) and includes pretty much every feature that I use regularly in a word processor, plus it can save files in formats that you can exchange with Word and WordPerfect users, plus open any of their files, too.

5. OpenOffice
http://www.openoffice.org/
Replaces Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint
If you want to replace the rest of the Office suite, your best bet is OpenOffice. It includes very nice replacements for Excel and PowerPoint (and workable replacements for Access and other Office elements). In fact, I actually prefer their Excel and PowerPoint replacements to the real thing.

6. ClamWin
http://www.clamwin.com/
Replaces Norton AntiVirus or McAfee
ClamWin is a slick anti-virus software that’s quite easy to manage and is unobtrusive while keep your system free of viruses. That’s pretty much all I want from a package, so why pay money for McAfee to keep bugging me all the time?

7. Gaim
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
Replaces AIM, Windows Messenger, etc.
This is a very clean instant messaging program that allows you to be on AOL Instant Messenger, Windows (MSN) Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger simultaneously with one program. There are other free packages that do this, but Gaim is stable and clean and simple.

8. BitTorrent
http://www.bittorrent.com/
Original but essential
From their website, “BitTorrent is a peer-assisted, digital content delivery platform that provides the fastest, most efficient means of distributing, discovering, and consuming large, high-quality files on the Web. Our mission is simple: to deliver the content that entertains and informs the digital world.” In other words, BitTorrent allows you to download large media files and also use your bandwidth to help others download these files. Search for media files you want and download ‘em.

9. GIMPShop
http://www.gimpshop.net/
Replaces Adobe Photoshop
This is a version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program that does a pretty solid job of imitating Adobe Photoshop – a regular user of Photoshop (like me) can adapt to it quite quickly. It’s very richly featured and runs quite well – in fact, I see no reason to ever go back, even if Photoshop were free.

10. Gnucleus
http://www.gnucleus.com/Gnucleus/
Replaces LimeWire, BearShare, etc.
Sure, LimeWire and BearShare are free, but why not just get the same basic software without all of the spyware? Gnucleus is pretty much identical to those software packages – but without all that extra junk that slows down your computer.

11. VLC Media Player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Replaces Windows Media Player, Quicktime, RealPlayer, etc.
If you get tired of having tons of media players on your computer, get this package that runs pretty much every media type you’ll run across without breaking a sweat.

12. Juice
http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/
Unique but essential
Juice lets you effortlessly subscribe to podcasts, organize them, and listen to them at your convenience. In conjunction with PodNova, I find it easier to use Juice to organize podcasts than using iTunes itself.

13. Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Unique but essential (for some)
If you’re interested in recording your own podcast (or just want to make your own voice recordings for whatever reason), Audacity and a microphone are pretty much all you need to get the job done. I’m not much for podcasting (let’s just say I don’t have a radio voice), but I use Audacity for other voice recording purposes.

14. RSSOwl
http://www.rssowl.org/
Unique but essential
RSSOwl is one of many open source RSS readers. In other words, it enables you to use one program to keep track of the content of a lot of different blogs; if you read a lot of blogs, it’s the only way to keep tabs on all of them without devoting hours jumping from site to site. If you have a laptop, it’s preferable to using sites like Bloglines, but if you’re on a desktop, a web-based feed manager might be better.

15. Filezilla
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/
Replaces WinFTP
Many people occasionally have a need to FTP files to other computers; if you ever have the need to transfer files in such a fashion, FileZilla will do the job slickly and quickly.

16. Keynote
http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote.html
Unique but essential
Keynote is basically designed specifically for the task of taking notes on a laptop. If you ever find yourself in a meeting or a presentation with your laptop open and want to jot down notes and organize them just a bit, Keynote is unquestionably the program for you. It’s not good at quality word processing, but that’s not the point. In my professional work, I find myself using Keynote almost as often as any other utility.

17. MusikCube
http://www.musikcube.com/
Replaces iTunes
If you’re not already committed to downloaded music from the iTunes Music Store, then MusikCube is the best choice available for a music organizer and player. It organizes your mp3s, makes it really easy and really fast to find them, and allows you to make some incredibly clever smart playlists.

18. Handbrake
http://handbrake.m0k.org/
Unique but essential
Handbrake enables you to stick a DVD in your DVD drive and have the contents of that film stored to your hard drive in a form that can be read by pretty much any media player. I often use it to put a few movies on my laptop for travel purposes, so I don’t have to worry about keeping track of DVDs while on the road.

19. X-Chat 2
http://www.silverex.org/
Replaces mIRC
X-Chat is a free IRC client. For those unfamiliar with IRC, it’s a place for technical people (and, as my wife loves to point out, nerds) to meet and discuss topics in an open environment. I often find it very useful when piecing through difficult technical issues.

20. KeePass
http://keepass.sourceforge.net/
Unique but essential
KeePass is a program that securely stores and manages the abundance of passwords we all use on a daily basis. I have literally hundreds of usernames and passwords spread out all over the place; KeePass keeps them all for me and keeps them safe.

21. TrueCrypt
http://www.truecrypt.org/
Unique but essential
TrueCrypt enables you to convert a memory stick into a strongly encrypted data storage device, meaning that you can store personal data on it without worrying about losing it and having personal information get out and about. I use it to keep some of my most personal data off of my laptop and strongly secured, just in case.

22. PDFCreator
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
Replaces Adobe Acrobat
PDFCreator creates a virtual printer on your computer that, if you print a document to it from any program, creates a PDF of that document that can be read on any computer with Acrobat Reader on it. After installing PDFCreator, all you have to do is print like normal and out comes a PDF!

23. Freemind
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/
Unique but Essential
Freemind is a “mind mapping” software program. In essence, it enables you to brainstorm and link together ideas quickly, creating “maps” of concepts similar to what you might do on a whiteboard. I find it incredibly useful when putting together ideas for new posts or planning small projects or assembling the backbone of a writing project.

24. NASA Worldwind
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
Replaces Google Earth
WorldWind is very similar to Google Earth in that it allows you to browse the globe. While it isn’t strong for creating maps (but why not just use Google Maps for that?), it is utterly incredible for viewing three-dimensional landscapes of any place on earth.

25. Notepad2
http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
Replaces Notepad
Notepad2 is a replacement for the traditional Windows Notepad that just adds a few sweet little features: multiple documents; line, word, and character counts; and some highlighting of tags. In fact, I’m using Notepad2 as I draft this post (after using Freemind to organize it).

26. HealthMonitor
http://healthmonitor.zucchetti.com/
Unique but useful
HealthMonitor enables you to keep an eye on the health of your computer. It identifies slowdowns and other system issues quickly and lets you know (for example, it gives a popup if your system memory gets to a certain percentage of fullness, or if your hard drive has only 10 GB free). This can keep you out of trouble and also give you clues to problems your machine might be having.

27. Workrave
http://www.workrave.org/
Unique but useful
Sometimes late into a writing session, my wrists get sore from too much repetitive movement. Workrave basically jumps in before this happens and locks down the computer for a while, preventing me from working too much and causing repetitive stress injury. Since I’ve started using it, it hasn’t significantly hurt my productivity at all and my wrists are thanking me!

28. GanttPV
http://www.pureviolet.net/ganttpv/
Replaces Microsoft Project
If you do any project management (or have a need to dip your toes in the water), GanttPV does a brilliant job of managing the task quickly, easily, and freely. If you need to move to MS Project later, you can export from GanttPV to Project, but once you start digging into GanttPV, you’ll likely have no reason to use Project.

29. GnuCash
http://www.gnucash.org/
Replaces Microsoft Money or Quicken
GnuCash is a slimmed-down version of the bloated Microsoft Money and Quicken packages, but it contains all of the features I want for managing my money. The interfaces are incredibly simple – it functions much like a checkbook ledger on your computer – but there’s a lot of meat hidden throughout the software.

30. True Combat: Elite
http://www.truecombatelite.net/
Replaces Quake IV, Halo, etc.
After all this downloading, you’re going to need to blow off a little steam, and I’ve yet to find a more enjoyable free game than this one. It’s basically a third person combat game, but the graphics are spectacular and the game is quite engrossing.

If you’ve downloaded and installed all of these, you’ve got access to all the productivity software you’ll likely need, clean and open and best of all free.

Wesabe is a community of people who share our experiences with our money so we can help each other make better financial decisions. We do this by aggregating and analyzing our community members’ personal financial data, and showing tips — recommendations to get the most from our money. These tips and recommendations come from the collective wisdom of our entire community. When one of us figures out how to make a great decision, we all learn.

I could go on and on about the features of Wesabe, but I’d just be repeating the content of this excellent introductory post on Get Rich Slowly. If you’re more of a visual type, just visit Wesabe or watch this wonderful orientation video.

At first, I thought Wesabe was a brilliant idea: it basically utilizes the community concepts embedded in many of the best websites around (like reddit or 43things, two personal favorites of mine) and applies it to personal finance thinking. That initial rush made me feel much like Matt Haughey does about Wesabe: it really is an amazingly cool tool.

But then I played around with the site for a while and I came away with a bit of a funny taste in my mouth.

First, for a site that requests a lot of personal data from you, their privacy policy leaves a lot to be desired. From their privacy policy:

We may use personal information to provide the services you’ve requested, including services that display customized content.
We use aggregate and non-personally identifiable data to provide the broader Wesabe community with information to make better decisions.
We may share aggregate data with third parties outside of Wesabe.
When we use third parties to assist us in processing your personal information, we require that they strictly comply with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.

Read those carefully. They are essentially saying that any personal financial data you give them will be (a) used to craft a profile of your personal financial habits which will then be (b) leveraged to create advertising that targets your very specific financial habits (meaning that the ads will be more tempting because they strike directly at your real money uses), (c) sold to third parties as long as they “strictly comply with their privacy policy,” and (d) immediately handed to unspecified third parties for unclearly specified reasons. They also provide no specifications on their methods of data security.

I don’t know about you, but having my financial data bandied about in such a fashion really frightens me. The only electronic personal finance data that I keep is encrypted and behind a firewall. I have little interest in allowing unspecified third parties to have a heyday with my data.

Second, the other sections of the website are essentially reproductions of digg and (especially) 43things. Although the entire site has a personal finance bent, the actual features provided are duplicates of features from other sites with a tweak or two.

The only real novel twist also worries more than it excites me: aggregate spending data. The site is able to give aggregate data on spending over all users so that you can see what you’re spending on certain things compared to a community consensus, but all that tells you is how much more or how much less of a consumer you are than other people using the site. If you’re really interested in improving your personal finance, your time is better spent with a real budgeting tool, determining what specific areas of spending you can cut down on, not comparing your spending to other spenders and simply feeling good because you spent less on beer this month than 27% of other Wesabi users.

Third, even the non-sensitive portions require an account, unlike the other community-based sites. Non-users can’t visit some of the sections that would be interesting to the general public, like the section that lists the most popular personal finance tips. You can’t tour the site in any fashion (outside of the video above) without signing up for an account; it was that reason alone why I signed up for a test account, simply so I could explore the options.

That being said, there are many good features of Wesabe. Of particular use are the tips and goals sections; the former has a digg-like interface that allows people to contribute personal finance tips and vote up the tips of others, while the goals section is very similar to 43things: it allows you to add goals, assign goals others have created to yourself, and discuss the goals in detail, again all with a personal finance bent. These parts of the site are intriguing and don’t require you to reveal specific personal financial data. There are also many aspects to the money management portion of the site that are intriguing, but I am hesitant to explore with real data due to my concerns with privacy; I would love to dig into them with real data, but for now I’m sitting them out.

If the creators of Wesabe read this, I have a couple of suggestions that could turn this from a merely intriguing site into an essential personal finance site. First, make the privacy policy extremely detailed and comprehensive. People who are really interested in personal finance (i.e., potential leaders within the community you are trying to build) are often very concerned with data privacy. Our passion is money management and one of the basic precepts is being careful with that money; we don’t like to hand out our data without some strong assurances about what will happen with our data. This is especially true for you, as a completely new entity without a track record of data security.

Second, make it possible for people to at least browse the tips and goals sections of the site. For outsiders who want to dip their toes in, these are fantastic tools for convincing people of the power of the community, but you keep these tools hidden from non-users. Look at the approach of digg or 43things; they don’t require signup for people to enjoy the non-sensitive content of the site, and this openness has propelled both sites into the general web consciousness. Such secrecy is just preventing people from diving into the site.

Given all this, I still think Wesabe is worth a whirl if you don’t provide any real personal data to the site. It’s useful for looking at tips and goals of others and contributing your own non-specific tips and goals; the only thing hindering this from becoming very useful is a relatively small userbase, which will likely grow in the future, as they’ve got Matt Haughey extolling their virtues and he is often ahead of the curve when it comes to spotting breakout communities.

First things first: download Firefox. If you look over on the right hand side of this post, you’ll see a button that will take you straight to the Firefox download page (you might have to scroll down a bit to see it). Download the program, install it, and give it a whirl.

Got Firefox installed? Good. Firefox is an extensible browser, meaning that with just a click you can download additional pieces that will allow your browser to do all sorts of interesting things. As for me, I like browser options that make it easy for me to save money. Here are ten Firefox extensions that will make it easier for you to save money while using the web.

Book Burro BookBurro may be my favorite FireFox plugin of all. You don’t ever notice it except when you visit a bookseller site, and then it pops up quietly on the upper left of the page. When you visit a book, it drops down, showing you prices for that same book at other booksellers. Not only has this saved me money on several book purchases, it also saves me the time of jumping from site to site. If you read much at all, this is the most important download on this list.

Pronto Pronto provides a tool similar to BookBurro, but not quite as elegantly. Pronto provides price comparisons on a wide variety of products with a floating button in the lower right of the screen. I’ve found this to be useful (interestingly enough) when shopping for kitchen products; Pronto helped me find a much better price on a great mixer.

Skype Sidebar This plugin integrates Skype with Firefox, making it very easy to call people and manage your contacts while surfing the web. For those unfamiliar, Skype is a program that allows you to make free person-to-person telephone calls via the internet, and extremely low cost calls to any telephone number. I find this particularly useful when discussing web materials with people; not only is the call free, but it is much easier for both parties to understand what is going on.

Gmail Space Rather than using a memory stick to transfer files, I often just use Gmail Space on the various machines I work on. This FireFox plugin lets me use my Gmail account as a tool for transferring files from place to place, provided I have an internet connection. This plugin is installed on every machine that I access with any regularity.

FareFirst FareFirst integrates with FireFox to enable you to quickly compare travel costs from location to location. If you’re planning a trip, you can just enter the information here and FareFirst will keep an eye on the trip for you. Each time you run FireFox, it will let you know what the best deal for the trip is.

Sage Sage is a site feed reader that integrates itself into Firefox, enabling you to add feeds to it with just a click. This extension saves me both time and money; I monitor a lot of blogs that update to mention good deals and other financial information and this tool enables me to keep tabs on all of them in reasonable time, thus saving both time and money.

Package Mapping As a frequent eBay seller, it’s financially important to me to keep track of packages as they’re shipped around the country. Package Mapping makes this very easy; I can keep tabs on where each package is and it alerts me when packages are delivered. It makes the process of tracking shipped items very easy, and that makes my work selling items on eBay that much easier and financially secure.

Minute Minder for Cingular This plug-in alerts you to the minutes you have remaining on your current cellular plan, which can be invaluable at helping you avoid overage fees. It quietly inserts itself into your browser window, so you can keep an eye on it without wasting valuable screen space. The only disadvantage is that this plugin currently only works with Cingular; I’m hoping to see it expand to other carriers soon.

Grocery List Generator I often see tasty and inexpensive recipes on the internet, but then I forget to buy the items for those recipes at the grocery store. Grocery List Generator incorporates itself into Firefox and makes it easy to add ingredients to a shopping list, whether you are finishing with a cupboard inventory or you want to make sure to buy some tarragon for that egg recipe.

Quitomzilla Although I’m not a smoker, several members of my family are, and I’m keenly aware how expensive the habit is. Quitomzilla is a plug-in that provides record-keeping and constant motivation to help people to quit smoking. If you’re a smoker, you’re burning up a lot of money; Quitomzilla can be priceless in helping you to kick the habit.

If you are a techie, please note that I am writing this article for home users who are not strongly adept with computer selection and buying. I am not interested in scaring people off by suggesting they build their own machine or anything; I’m merely making suggestions on how to optimize home computer upgrade expenses for non-technical people.

When I arrived for the consultation, the husband showed me a machine that he had spec’d out from Dell. The package he was excited to purchase had an Intel Celeron D processor running at 2.80 GHz, only 512 MB of RAM, a 120 GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM drive and a DVD-RW drive, a 17″ CRT monitor, a copy of Windows XP Pro, a Dell Laser Printer, a Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse, some nice speakers, and a small power supply. This package added up to $991.

I read through the specifications twice and I asked him why he had made some of these choices. He said he wanted to “upgrade” all of the features he had on his own computer. So, we went and looked at his own unit and discovered that it was very similar to what he was purchasing from Dell, but many of the components were duplicated.

The first rule of saving money on a computer upgrade is determine which components actually need to be upgraded. You do not need to replace your printer or your keyboard or your mouse or your monitor (unless you want to) or your speakers or your power supply. If you’re technically savvy, you can also salvage many internal parts for future usage.

My client already had a printer that he was largely happy with, a wireless keyboard and wireless optical mouse he was very happy with, and speakers that he was also happy with. He also had a wonderful power supply sitting under his desk, so he didn’t need that, either. He seemed genuinely surprised that he could use parts from his old computer on his new one.

Next, we looked at his software options. The second rule of saving money on a computer upgrade is never re-buy software, ever. He had already purchased a copy of Windows XP, so we scratched the copy of Windows XP Pro. He had been considering getting a copy of Microsoft Office for the machine, but I showed him Open Office instead and we decided to use Open Office for now.

Once we made these choices, we realized that we could re-spec the machine. I asked the couple whether they were committed to their budget of $1,000 and they agreed that even with the savings, they were still budgeting that amount. So we looked at machines again.

The third rule of saving money on a computer upgrade is get the most processor you can within your budget. This will always save you money in the long run, because most everything else can be upgraded with ease. We moved his machine from a Celeron D to an Intel Core2 Duo running at 2.13 Ghz. This will ensure a much longer life for their computer without worrying about changes in operating systems. I felt completely confident telling them that this processor would easily be able to handle the next version of Windows.

We also moved their system from 512 MB of RAM to 2 GB of RAM. The fourth rule of saving money on a computer upgrade is the more memory, the better (within budget, of course). We were also able to get a 19″ flat panel monitor rather than the 17″ CRT monitor. The total cost difference? $18 over the system my client had spec’d.

To summarize, here are the steps you can take to maximize your next computer upgrade:
1. Look at all of the components you have and decide which ones can be reused. The most common reusable elements are the mouse, keyboard, printer, monitor, speakers, and power supply, though you may spot other things. This also includes software, like Windows XP and Microsoft Office. Then simply don’t buy them.
2. When deciding which system to buy, the one component you shouldn’t skimp on is the processor. If you’ve maxed out your processor, then get as much memory as you can. Once you’ve done that, get as much hard drive space as you can. Other items can be upgraded later and they’re much easier and less expensive.
3. For compatibility reasons, it’s almost always worth it to go with a major name-brand vendor, because software is designed to work with their components. You might be able to get a slightly better deal with items from Joe’s Komputer Shack, but if you’re not technically proficient, it may be quite challenging to get it to work and if you have to call someone to fix things, you’ll be losing money.

You can save yourself a lot of money in the long run using these methods. I estimate that by the end of the lifetime of the computer, some smart thinking at the start will have saved my clients $1000 and likely some frustration as well.

1. Unplug your laptop and remove the battery immediately. You need to eliminate all power sources to the laptop as quickly as possible or you’re begging for fried components. Don’t even mess with a proper shutdown; save any documents you absolutely must save, then power it down immediately and remove the power cord and battery from your laptop. As liquid goes through your laptop, every second that power continues to flow through it is another second of increased risk for your laptop.

2. Don’t put the battery back on! I’m including this step here because it is important. No matter what, don’t even consider reattaching power to your laptop for a bare minimum of twenty four hours. If you do, you’re risking any chance of repair to your laptop.

3. Remove any detachable components. One by one, remove everything that you can remove from your laptop. Remove all cards from the card slots, all drives from the drive slots, the keyboard, the memory, and so forth. This is a great time to dig out that dusty manual, as it’ll provide diagrams for removal of most of the components. As you remove each component, you’ll want to make sure they are clean; if there’s any sign of wetness at all, perform steps four and five (below) on those components.

4. Rinse your laptop (except the screen) with distilled water. Regular tap water often has minerals in it that can create deposits and bad connections on the electronic components on your laptop. Get a gallon or two of distilled water at your local grocery store and carefully rinse your laptop and any components that may need it. Do this as soon as possible, before any liquids begin to dry inside your machine. Don’t worry about it getting wet again; the goal here is to minimize the amount of non-water materials inside of your laptop. I recommend repeating this on every component two or three times.

5. Clean your keyboard with extreme care. This step is often very difficult and time-consuming, but it needs to be done. If your manual does not contain an exact diagram of your keyboard’s key placements, take a picture of your keyboard before you begin. You’ll probably want to use an isopropyl alcohol mix for this step to ensure the parts are as clean as possible; the isopropyl alcohol that you get at the pharmacy is often too potent for this, so I recommend a 50-50 solution of isopropyl alcohol and distilled water. What you’ll need to do is remove each key individually from its fitting, clean it and its fitting carefully with the alcohol mix, and then let each piece dry before reinserting it. Without a picture to go by, this can be a very difficult task. If your laptop has a membrane, clean it similarly.

6. Hand-dry your laptop of any sitting liquid. At this point, if any sitting liquid remains on your laptop or any component, hand-dry it gently with a paper towel to eliminate this liquid. You want to eliminate all surface liquid at this point (it should mostly be water) so that you can get into the narrower places during the next step.

7. Clean your entire laptop carefully with rubbing alcohol and a Q-Tip. At this point, the only “bad” liquid remaining in your computer should be in the small places: in your motherboard and so forth. The best way to get rid of a lot of this liquid is to clean everything with an isopropyl alcohol solution and a Q-Tip. Go carefully over the pieces of your computer that came in contact with the liquid with the alcohol solution, using a Q-Tip to make sure parts are as clean as possible. I am frighteningly meticulous about steps like this, but I would at least recommend going over everything twice with this method.

8. Carefully clean your screen. Remember that bottle of isopropyl alcohol from step five? You’re going to make another 50-50 mixture of that with water. Use a very, very soft cloth (I like to use flannel) and clean the screen gently with this mixture; I would recommend doing this twice. When you’re done, dry it off as best you can with the cloth. You can also use this procedure for any external part of the laptop that you want clean, but you need to be very gentle with the screen when doing this.

9. Let your laptop sit and dry for a minimum of 24 hours. I left my laptop out on a table on top of a layer of paper towels, directed a fan on it, and let everything sit for 48 hours before I even thought about reattaching everything and turning on the power. I would recommend a bare minimum of 24 hours. Don’t be tempted to “hurry” this along by using heat; you’ll possibly cause additional damage to your components.

If these steps do not work, it is likely that your accident caused some direct component damage to your laptop and it will have to be replaced. However, I have had great success with this procedure (and have heard many success stories from others), which has saved me thousands of dollars. Good luck!

1. Switch your phone to VoIP. VoIP refers to the use of your home computer’s broadband connection as a telephone service. There are different programs that have various features and benefits, but they are almost universally less expensive than traditional land lines and cellular phones. Two of the most popular options are Skype (free to other Skype users, but fees for calls to non-Skype phones) and Vonage (flat monthly rate for unlimited calls in the United States and very cheap per minute internationally).

2. Utilize online-only savings accounts. In the past few years, a number of branchless, online-only, FDIC insured banks have cropped up that provide astoundingly high interest rates on a normal no minimum balance savings account. These rates tend to be eight or nine times as high as typical banks (which offer a 0.5% rate of return on average). Two of the most popular include ING Direct (currently offering 4.4% APY and very easy to sign up) and HSBC Direct (currently offering 5.05% APY). This means that investing $100 in an ING Savings account would return $4.40 in a year, or $5.05 at HSBC Direct, versus $0.50 at your typical bank. Plus, you can fully manage your account on your computer, transferring money to and from your checking account as you wish.

3. Combine your entertainment needs. A modern personal computer can replace your stereo, your television, and your video game consoles. You can move all of your music on CD to your computer using programs such as iTunes, then use your computer speakers to play back music when you want it. If you have a large monitor and a TV tuner card, you can use your monitor as a television by playing your television feed through your computer. You can also sign up for services such as GameTap to utilize your home computer as a video game console.

4. Keep an eye on your finances. I use online banking and credit card accounts to keep a daily tab on what’s in my accounts and what I’m spending my money on. This way, I know what I can afford to spend and what I can’t. Many banks and virtually all major credit card providers allow online account access, which gives you very easy control over your money. Beyond that, there are a number of excellent packages out there that enable you to manage your finances as a whole and do your own taxes, though they can be complex to set up. I use Microsoft Money, which can be downloaded for a 90 day free trial.

5. Sell your hobby. Whatever your hobby is, you can probably find a place to sell the products of that hobby. eBay is a great place to get started, though there may be better places for your specific hobby. Here’s an example: a friend of mine likes to fold simple origami pieces while doing other things, such as watching television; it’s a nervous tic for her. So she started folding lots of paper cranes. She was aware that a thousand paper cranes are often given as a gift among the Japanese, so she decided to start selling thousand crane lots on eBay. Thanks to her computer, she can sit at her rural home, watch television in the evening, and sell the numerous cranes she makes with her own hands.

6. Write about your random thoughts and interests. It is incredibly easy to get a simple blog at Blogger and put a Google AdSense bar on the side of it; Blogger walks you through the process very gently. With this, you can write anonymous random thoughts on whatever you want: your personal life, your favorite television show, whatever. You can just channel some of your own thoughts into a written form and post them. Not only does it provide an outlet for you to express yourself, it also enables you to improve your writing skill over time as painlessly as possible and you can earn a few dollars from the AdSense bar.

7. Do some comparison shopping. There are a multitude of places to shop online, and there are often many places selling the same item. For example, just for books alone, I used to check amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a few others. It’s easy to find a better price for an item than you might find in your own town. Even better, people are beginning to create software tools to make comparison shopping even easier. My favorite is Book Burro: when you view a book on a site like amazon.com using FireFox, it will pop up a little window immediately informing you of the cost of that book at various other online sites, helping you to quickly find the lowest price.

8. Throw out your reference texts. With an internet-accessible computer, there’s little need for such reference texts as a dictionary or a thesaurus or an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a suitable replacement for an encyclopedia for general usage. Dictionary.com provides the same usage as a dictionary, and thesaurus.com is a functional thesaurus. In the modern world, there’s little need to invest in such reference texts.

9. Find a better credit card. We’ve all signed up for some pretty terrible credit card deals in the past, but the internet enables you to find a credit card offer that matches your needs much better. You can easily return 2% of your spending to yourself if you can locate a strong credit card offer. Even better, you can easily find balance transfer offers that will eliminate the interest you’re paying on a card. Obviously, a credit card is a tool that you need to be careful with, but I use one for my primary spending (groceries, etc.), keep the balance paid each month, and they literally pay me to use it. I would have never found this offer without the internet.

10. Use a computer as your cooking aid. Many people eat out because of the hassle of preparing food at home. It might not be tasty, you think, or you might mess it up. Plus, many people don’t want to invest in cookbooks or other methods of teaching themselves how to cook. Wikipedia offers extensive explanations of culinary techniques, even if you’re scared of boiling water. Plus, there are countless recipes available on the internet for dishes of all levels of complexity: RecipeZaar, for example, has thousands of recipes for beginning cooks. Not only will you learn a new skill, but you’ll quickly see how much cheaper it is to cook at home, a process aided by your computer.

11. Make your own calendars and other documents. Many people buy wall calendars for their home when a few printed pages will suffice. “But I don’t have a program that will make a calendar!” you say. Open Office is a free software suite that includes a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, and much more; even more important, it includes templates for making calendars, newsletters, and so forth. We use an old wall calendar for its pretty pictures and just tape printed pages over each month.

12. Save money when you travel. I am consistently surprised at the number of people who still choose to pay high prices by booking flights directly from the airline or through a travel agent when there are numerous easy tools online that will save you tons of money on your travel costs. Priceline, Travelocity, and Expedia all are amazingly easy to search and find the cheapest prices from your location to your destination and back – and they can sometimes save hundreds of dollars on your travel over calling a travel agent or directly calling an airline.

13. Print coupons before you shop. The internet provides unbelievably good access to coupons that you can use at your local grocery store, and a little bit of effort can transform coupons directly into cash. I check sites such as coupons.com before each shopping trip, checking to see if there are any manufacturer coupons available for items I’m going to buy, then just take them to the store with me and convert them to cash at the register.

14. Learn marketable skills. Your computer can teach you a lot, too. When I first purchased my computer, I was an atrocious touch typer, but I utilized sites like Learn2Type and TyperShark to teach myself how to type 80 words per minute. Want to know the intricacies of Word and Excel to better market yourself for a job? Microsoft offers extensive training on how to perform those tasks. You can also learn how to create web pages from scratch. Each of these skills will give you a leg up in the workplace.

The computer can be a very valuable tool – you just have to know how to use it.