Stories by: Rick Broida

Business still revolves around the Big Three software applications: word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. And Microsoft still charges an arm and a leg for Office licenses. What's a cash-strapped small shop to do?

If you're in the business of making presentations, you know what a time-suck it can be to work with PowerPoint on a laptop. You have to connect a projector, wait an eternity for the PC to boot, run PowerPoint, load your slide deck, switch the laptop's video output to projector mode, and on and on. It's easy to blow 10-20 minutes just getting set up for your presentation--not a productive use of your time.

True story: I'd been getting fed up with Firefox, in part because it was acting sluggish and flaky, so I decided to give Google's Chrome browser a try. And by "try," I mean make it my primary browser for a couple weeks.

Since I last ran a reader Q&A a few weeks ago, I've received another compelling question. Reader Robert has an older Emachines desktop that recently developed a problem: "I installed a driver updater tool, and when I deleted it, it did something that changed my BIOS. The black screen appears when I boot up and reads: 'System BIOS shadowed. Check time and date settings. System CMOS checksum bad--default configuration used.'"

True story. I'd been getting fed up with Firefox, in part because it was acting sluggish and flaky, so I decided to give Google's Chrome browser a try. And by "try," I mean make it my primary browser for a couple weeks.

Wine gets better with age. Men get more distinguished-looking. And some programs are like perennials, returning each year with fresh blooms and stronger stems. Indeed, think of some of the world's best productivity tools and system utilities, and I'll wager that some were "planted" at least five years ago--decades in computer years. Take a look at eight of these blossoming apps, all of which are more awesome than ever, and all of which are, amazingly, free.

Reader Patricia has a question: "Why can't application software be put on USB drives instead of [hard] disks?"

As you may recall, Amazon recently unveiled its new Cloud Drive service, which provides 5GB of free online storage. (Elsewhere I explained how you could bump your limit to 20GB for under a buck.) The only downside? To access it, you have to use Amazon's Web-based interface. It's not bad, but not nearly as convenient as, say, a local hard drive.

Among the many reasons I'm partial to Firefox is that Mozilla's browser has long offered a built-in spell checker. (Not that I need it, of course -- we payd riters learnt gud speling in skool.)

Much as everyone loves Microsoft's Windows 7, not everyone has made the move yet. Plenty of folks are clinging to Windows XP for dear life, while others just didn't see enough reason to upgrade from Vista. After all, it's not like Microsoft is giving Windows 7 away for free.