Monday, December 07, 2015

Bare Minimum Software

With the financial year end fast approaching it is time to consider any kit purchases in anticipation of activities during 2016 (and I don’t get that list right very often in truth). A laptop upgrade to something smaller and lighter looks a good idea – particularly with one of the teenagers having a dead machine and thus more than grateful for my cast off (actually not a bad spec - certainly going to outperform most current low end offerings).

Buying hardware is just a few clicks in a web browser these days but the software component list promises a long session just running installs.

What would be on your list for a basic set-up?

I started with:




Plus some homemade tools and utilities.

Then there is the question of MS Office – will Gmail’s ability to display (say) Word documents fill in enough on incoming attachments to get by?

Something to read PDF’s I suppose.

Any suggested additions?

Factor in a few system updates to add to the confusion and slow package download speeds and this already looks like a day’s work

Edit:

Cracked and added a copy of MS Office. With the release of Office 2016 there are a lot of bargains around - particularly with earlier versions. In fact by a series of stock shortages I ended up with a copy of 2016 Pro for the price of a 2013 Home & Office on the residual market.

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