[mikester]

I tried to use an ibook for a few months and while functionally it was great ('m a UNIX sys admind more or less) it was just too damn slow.

Now I have an IBM P4 based T41 that is great and I run XP on it with Linux in VMware. It's FANTASTIC as I get the best of both worlds.

I am using a great deal of freeware software in general. The office uses MS Office 2003 so I have that AND MS gave me a free copy a while back as a promotional deal. I think a good thread addition would be to share what freeware programs you're using as we might not know about them. I'm looking for some calandar program to replace the exchange setup the wife and I use to share calendar info between computers and PDAs.

I use these:

Mozilla(FIrefox)
CDBurner XP PRo (Fantastic CD/DVD burning software that is free)
Putty(SSH client)
Open Office
Spybot
Fedora Core 2 (Linux OS)