Stan Beer
Monday, 09 June 2008 14:17
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
Anyway I got my Microsoft supplied copy of Vista Ultimate
loaded, also loaded my Microsoft supplied copy of Office 2007 Ultimate
and for a few months everything seemed to go smoothly.
It wasn't lightning fast. Outlook still often
took minutes to download the hundreds of emails I get every day. Word
still took a few seconds to load. My latest security software seemed to
work OK without slowing things down too much. It was not ideal but
acceptable. I needed a monster computer to get acceptable performance
from the latest software but I needed a reliable system so I wore the
overhead.
After a few months, however, I started to get frustrated. I had a
computer that was almost a gamer's box but it was still making me wait
for my emails to download and I was still occasionally pressing
Ctrl-Alt-Delete to cancel a process that had stalled the system.
I had heard about how cloud computing could free users from the constraints of the desktop so I decided to give it a try.
Since Google seemed to have the most accessible free email, calendar
and online word processing package available I opened a Gmail account.
That also gave me access to Google Calendar and Google Docs.
From the outset I have to say that not one of the Google online
packages is as feature rich or as elegant as the MS Office counterpart.
However, I decided to stick with them and give them a fair trial. So
were they good enough? Please read on to page 4
