Microsoft no more

So I never thought this would happen but Microsoft has managed to fall out of favor with me. Between numerous security updates, nightmares of upgrading to SP2 (it ate a hard drive in an ugly way), and Outlook being fully featured but bloated as a sun ripened whale corpse I have fallen off the beaten path. Don’t get me wrong – I love some aspects of Microsoft software – the way most of their products work well with each other and are “aware” of other products installed to integrate with each other is nice, but the lack of speed, security, and stability has finally pushed me over the edge.

The other night I got sick of Outlook taking 5+ seconds to open a folder, and god forbid an IMAP folder – then it would take upwards of 30 seconds to check and make sure the folder contents had not changed before it would even display offline files. I uninstalled the entirety of Office, and started looking for replacements. First came Thunderbird – the Mozilla mail project. It’s not as fully featured as Outlook, but the way I look at it is that it does what I need to, and it’s fast! The entire installed (including the RSS reader and PGP extensions) is 8.7mb and it installs in less than a minute. After about an hour of tweaking I had it behaving the way I wanted it, and boy is it zippy. I can’t comment on stability yet, but so far not a single error or crash.

Now as for the rest of office – I decided upon Open Office – something I’ve used before and like. It offers most of the MS Office functionality, while being 20% the size, 8 times faster, and free (not to mention open source). It does not integrate quite as well with Thunderbird as well as Office integrated with Outlook, but again I’m willing to make that sacrifice for the speed and ease of use.

In a way it saddens me to leave Microsoft products – I’ll still use Windows and MSN Messenger, but given my recent negative experiences I’m taking giant strides away from their products. I’m the last person I ever thought would do this – I’ve always been one of Microsoft’s more vocal supporters.

Go on – give Mozilla a try, I dare you!

Update:
Oh yeah – and my Microsoft 802.11g router just failed. I guess I'm going to call Microsoft in the morning and see if I can get it replaced. Although at this point I'm almost tempted to go buy something else.

You know – if not for the fact that Adobe Photoshop - my most treasured application – only runs on Windows and Mac I would be half tempted to make the switch to Linux tonight!

Comments

[TechMount]

I've never been a big fan of Microsoft, since the sad DOS days really. Most of the time I ended up running Windows as my OS on my main workstation, simply because the applications I needed ran on Windows only. Now things are changing. I migrated to Firefox and Thunderbird a while ago and extremely happy with them.