Hello Families:
With the costs to homeschooling families on the rise,  and with the economy being as bad as it is,  many families are having to make cutbacks.   I thought I’d write a few articles here to point you to some freebies on the internet (I assume you have internet access since your reading this)  Hopefully,  this will help take some of the sting out of your wallet.

First off, no one who ventures out into the internet should be online without a good anti virus program.  Viri are everywhere and even sites you might not suspect, have stuff embedded in them to try and either take control of your PC or glean information that could lead to identity theft.

This brings us to my first set of web goodies.  There are several good anti virus programs that are FREE!  Yes you read that right FREE. Avast is the software I currently run on my systems and have had great success with it.  It’s easy to install,  and it is updated almost nightly with new definitions to keep the baddies at bay.  There is also AVG another great free anti virus program that is also free.  Both will require you to register, but they if they just want an email for the price of an Anti Virus program…what the heck.  Oh,  I recommend you setup a free Gmail account just for this purpose.  Pointing all those free software programs to Gmail address keeps them happy and your inbox clear of any ads or notices that these companies may send out.

Our next freebie is an office suite called Open Office 3 ,  OpenOffice 3 is an open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more.  It is available in many languages and works on all common computers.  It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

So far so good eh?  Well there’s more!  But I’ll do some of them in my next post.  My goal here is to share a little of the computer knowledge I have,  and to help homeschool families to be able to save money while still having tools available enhance your computer experience.

The next  article will be about free operating systems and other goodies.

TechnoDad
Signing OFF!