How to Become an Ex-Pirate
I used to pirate software. Until 2007, every piece of software I used was either pirated, free, or open source. Music wasn’t spared, either. At one point I had nearly 80 gigs of music, most ripped from friend’s CD collections or downloaded. I could write a whole post on how I justified piracy. I came under some personal conviction about stealing in 2007 and started a long trek to “switch” to legit. I thought it would be hard, but I made some interesting discoveries and found out in the long run that going legal has its own rewards.
Music: mp3.amazon.com
This site is great. All music tracks are 89-99 cents, most albums are around 9 dollars. All tracks are encoded at the very high quality of 320kbps. Most important: NO DRM. If you buy from iTunes, you’re getting stuck with files chained to Apple’s software. Amazon’s files have no such restriction. I’ve found that buying a track or album off of Amazon is a satisfying experience. It’s easy to find the files, purchase is one-click, you can preview anything you buy, the file quality is always good, and you don’t have to worry about cooties or getting sued.
Operations System: Windows Vista Home Premium (Upgrade)
For 95% of the users, this version of Vista will do anything you need. The upgrade is easily obtainable for less than 70 dollars. The only caveat is that you have to use this trick to upgrade if you are coming from a pirated version of XP. Don’t scoff either, I tried using a PC with XP after 3 months with Vista, and for all the gripes I think Vista is the better OS. Just don’t run it on PC with 512MB of RAM.
Productivity Apps: Office Ultimate Steal
The Home and Student Edition of MS Office 2007 has Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Onenote. It’s going to cost at least 70 dollars. But for students, at least until the end of Spring semester 2008, you can get Microsoft’s Ultimate Steal deal for 60 dollars. It’s Microsoft Office Ultimate, which has every piece of software in the Office suite. It retails around 620 dollars. If you can’t swing for Office, try Open Office 3. It’s a decent substitute, for free.
Everything else has a free or open source version. The only problematic areas for me were web site design and a good photo/art app. Dreamweaver is unbeatable (130.00 Student), and for a decent art/photo app that’s free, Gimp is ok. I’d rather have Paint Shop Pro though, and you can get it for around 60 dollars.
Well, that’s about it. In today’s software world it may seem like all the good stuff is really expensive, but you can usually shop around and find good deals or alternative packages. Good luck!