I planned on doing the “same old” routine of posting a link to an interesting article with a little commentary, but there was just so much going on today that I had to cram it all into one! So here we go:

Why You Need to Abandon Your "Rescue Fantasy" (and yes, you do have one!) – Dave Navarro rocks your day with a look at your “rescue fantasy”. He’s right. A lot of people (myself included) spend our time thinking life would be better if only ___________. What a fantastic article this is!

20 Life Lessons I Learned in my 20’s – Marc from Marc and Angel Hack Life pauses to reflect as he approaches his 28th birthday. We all benefit from it.

13 Awesome Money Saving Sites We Love at Wise Bread – The writers at Wise Bread share where you can find coupons, deals, and plenty of money-saving advice. You can even set up a savings account that people can donate money to!

Gizmodo covers the big Apple announcements of today! – Apple held a big conference today to announce cheaper MacBooks, as well as the iPhone 3GS. In addition, the iPhone 3G will now be $99, according to Apple. So the question is, will this be enough to bring in new Apple fans? We know the fanboys are lusting over it (I’m following a few of them on Twitter – yeah, they get pretty annoying on days like this), but what about us casual users? I haven’t owned a Mac or an iPhone, so now I have to think about whether or not this is enough for me to switch. What about you?

Let’s discuss in the comments, shall we?

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 (Note: This was the only picture I found that could accurately express “bloated software”. I hate these commercials.)

One of the hallmarks of being a Practical Nerd is the ability to legally get the most functionality out of your computer without having to pay an arm and a leg. But there are so many people I talk to out there that have no clue about most of these options. Therefore, I am begging you to share this article with everyone you know! It needs to be spread around. There are a few great benefits that come with using these Practical Nerd Alternatives:

• You will literally save hundreds of dollars in most cases.
• About 98% of the general public will still retain all the functionality that they need, if not more.
• You will, in most cases, be able to jump right into the program and know how to use it easily.
• All of these options are perfectly fine to use, even if you are sharing files with someone who is using a more bloated program.
• When these programs get updated with new features – you get them, without having to buy a whole new piece of software!

1. Your office program (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.).

Cooler People: Microsoft Office.

Practical Nerds: Open Office, or Google Documents.

Why?: Microsoft Office is the standard-bearer in office products. Everybody has them, and they do fine work. But in 2007, Microsoft Office started messing around with what worked – they added a “ribbon” interface at the top, which looked really cool. The problem is, people who start using it have NO idea how to find anything! In addition, we all know Microsoft Office is freaking expensive. According to Microsoft’s web site, the retail price for Microsoft Office Standard is $399.95! Yup, and this is a suite of programs that does NOT come with Windows.

Open Office replaces your Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint, while also having a handful of programs of their own. Functionality is simple, but loaded with plenty of features. You can use it to open Office documents – even those created in Office 2007, which Office 2003 can NOT do – and save in those same formats. So, if you need to swap files back and forth with someone using Office, there’s no problem!

Google Documents is a suite of office products online – you do all your work in a web browser. Google Docs is much simpler than Open Office, but still has a host of features that make it comparable for most word processing and spreadsheet needs. It also has the ability to create forms that will then supply data for a spreadsheet automatically, and it has Presentation, which replaces your PowerPoint. All files are hosted online, so it is an automatic backup solution as well. Like Open Office, Google Docs also handles all Office files as well.

2. Your web browser.

Cooler People: Internet Explorer.

Practical Nerds: Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.

Why?: Internet Explorer is junk. It takes up way too much resources and slows your computer down. Most of IE’s features over the last few years have been in response to other web browsers’ features that have proven to be very popular.

I’m a Firefox man, and I’m proud of it. You can customize Firefox to handle all of your web browsing needs and then some. It is a powerhouse, and it has a wizard on its official website to walk you through customizing it to your liking.

Google Chrome is a new kid here on the market, and I know plenty of people who really enjoy it. If a web site causes Chrome to crash, it only crashes the open tab, not the entire browser. It is also simple and clean, allowing you to fill the page with websites rather than toolbars.

3. Your antivirus protection.

Cooler People: Symantec, Norton.

Practical Nerds: AVG, Avira Antivirus, Avast!, Panda Cloud Antivirus

Why?: Because antivirus protection should be free. If you are paying for antivirus protection, it is an absolute waste of your money. Use any of the free solutions above and you will be more than protected. Plus, check out The Practical Nerd’s hands-on review of Panda Cloud Antivirus.

4. In-depth photo editing.

Cooler People: Adobe Photoshop.

Practical Nerds: GIMP.

Why?: Photoshop has become the Kleenex of photo manipulation. If somebody has edited a photo, we say they “Photoshopped” it. It is the biggest thing going – and it costs $699. GIMP is free, and it is powerful. It does just about anything the average person would need. If you are used to Photoshop, try GIMPshop, which is a version of GIMP designed to function very similarly to Photoshop for an easy transition.

5. Your note-taking.

Cooler People: Microsoft OneNote.

Practical Nerds: Evernote.

Why?: OneNote is a powerful program and is a great way to hold all your notes – but it costs $99.95. In my experience with OneNote, backing up your notebooks is a big hassle: when I did, in fact, backup my system before I reinstalled Windows, I could not restore my OneNote backup for anything, and there is very little information online to help out with that. So I lost my notes anyway.

Evernote has both a desktop client and an online note-taking platform for you. They sync automatically, so your notes are always backed up and accessible anywhere. Evernote has plenty of great features, and yes, it is free.

6. Burning CDs and DVDs.

Cooler People: Nero or Roxio.

Practical Nerds: DVDStyler and CDBurnerXP.

Why?: How lame is it that you have to spend a couple hundred bucks on software to use something that came with your computer? Why is this not integrated with any software that comes with your computer? CDBurnerXP handles any CD or DVD burning that you want to throw at it. Want cool menus on your DVD? Use DVDStyler. They are both dead-simple to use and make burning any discs a snap.

7. Playing back music and movies.

Cooler People: Windows Media Player.

Practical Nerds: KMPlayer.

Why?: KMPlayer is my newest discovery, and it might be my favorite. Windows Media Player, while free, is fairly confusing to the average user. If you don’t have the right codecs or something is goofy, it won’t play your video. KMPlayer comes with every codec under the sun, and it plays music, movie files, DVDs, VCDs, you name it – “out of the box”, meaning it just works. Install it and then just use it. It’s slick-looking, and it can handle whatever you want to throw at it. Many people online will tell you to use VLC Player for this, but I find VLC to be just a bit confusing for the average user, and it did not always work properly on my XP machine. KMPlayer does, every time.

8. Handling all of your emails and scheduling.

Cooler People: Microsoft Outlook.

Practical Nerds: Gmail and Google Calendar.

Why?: Outlook is also in the Microsoft Office suite, meaning we’re already talking about paying hundreds of dollars just to use it. Gmail allows you to organize all of your email accounts in one place, enables you to search deeply through all of your emails, and you can download a notifier to sit in your system tray to let you know when you have new mail, just like Outlook. Plus, Gmail stores everything online, so you free up a LARGE amount of space on your computer! Gmail also has a new feature called Gmail Offline, which allows you to work on your email offline and sync it up with your Gmail account when you restore internet access. It’s all free, and there are more features than I can even talk about here – I plan to put together a user’s guide to Gmail in the near future.

Google Calendar allows any type of color-coding, will automatically email or text you reminders of events (if you want it to), imports any number of calendars, and you can even share calendars with other people (handy for families that need to work off of one calendar). And like Gmail, Google Calendar stores everything online, which means it is accessible anywhere.

9. Handling your finances.

Cooler People: Microsoft Money, or Quicken.

Practical Nerds: Spreadsheets (both Open Office and Google Docs have checkbook templates online), Mint, Thrive, ClearCheckbook, many others.

Why?: Is it ironic that money management programs cost so much? Microsoft Money costs $59.99, and it has a ridiculous number of features that nobody is ever going to use. Quicken is $39.99 and is pretty much the same. Also, a new version comes out for both and you are stuck with outdated software.

One of my more anticipated posts in the next week or so will be how to manage your money for free and get all the functionality you would use out of Money or Quicken. By combining a spreadsheet with an online account aggregator like Mint or Thrive, you get all the reports you need, plus extra (and useful!) features that only online offerings present. But in brief, spreadsheets allow a neat, safe way to track your expenses while the program does the math for you. Plus, it saves paper, if you are into that sort of thing.

Whew! That’s a lot of different options! But as you can see, mainstream, well-known programs are not always the best options for you. You’ve just been using them because everyone else has. Now you can drop those bulky programs and still do everything you are used to doing! Do you disagree with any of these choices? Do you use a different option not listed here? Sound off in the comments! Let’s hear it!

Get great, practical advice sent straight to your inbox every week! For more information on The Practical Nerd Rules for Life, click here. Plus, learn how you can get a copy of my FREE ebook!

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In the past year, as I’ve dived deeper and deeper into nerdism, I’ve made drastic changes to my computer. It all started with Windows Vista. I defended Vista for over a year – my laptop came with it, and all I really needed out of it was decent performance and an internet connection. Nothing fancy. Then one day last year, about a month after I started living off of my writing business (which completely depended on having an active internet connection throughout the day), my internet would not load any pages. I was connected, but I couldn’t do anything. My then-roommate could do anything with XP, but I was stuck.

I took it to a “Windows Certified” computer repair service. They even came over and sat at my desk for over an hour. Nothing. The guy took it home and worked on it for hours. Nothing. His solution? Reinstall Windows. I called Toshiba (the maker of my laptop) and they told me the same. There was no solution. I found forums online with people who had the same problem, but with no fix for it.

Now, as much as I would like this article to be about how much I hate Vista for that, it’s not. I’m setting this up for you. I didn’t have a copy of XP, and every version of Vista comes with a free downgrade to XP if needed – except for Vista Basic. Guess which version I had? So, since I didn’t have over $200 lying around to buy XP, I started looking at Ubuntu, which is a version of Linux. I tried it out, loved it, and made copies of all my important files onto my external hard drive for “safekeeping”. But, as I installed Ubuntu, I learned that I had absolutely NO idea what I was doing, and I promptly (accidentally) erased my entire external hard drive clean. All those important files and business notes were gone.

So I’m an idiot, right? Well, I learned from that experience and made sure I knew what I was doing the next time I had to install a new operating system on my computer. In fact, I had to do such a thing later in the year, when I learned that Ubuntu wouldn’t allow me to run Skype through my computer – and I had already purchased a phone line through Skype for a year. I managed to get a copy of XP and, after unplugging my external drive so that nothing could happen to it, I reinstalled my computer yet again. But I took my time in moving everything off the external drive onto my laptop’s hard drive right away.

Two weeks later, the hard drive failed completely. All my files were gone. Again.

Now, you may be backing up to an external drive or DVDs, or you may not be backing up at all. But just because you are not reinstalling operating systems every few months doesn’t mean you have no need. Here are a handful of reasons why you need an online backup solution:

1. We all keep important files on our computers nowadays. You’ve got financial records, work documents, and pictures on your computer. It’s a part of your household now, right? You need to protect that stuff!
2. Hard drives fail (apparently). All hard drives can fail. Any time. You just can’t rely on them in the long term for all your storage needs. You need to keep multiple copies to ensure that, when one of them does fail, you can restore your files from another.
3. Natural disasters can negate any local backup. A fire, a flood, a tornado, an earthquake – you name it. If you’ve got everything backed up to an external drive that is sitting right next to your computer, you are missing the point. That’s like making two copies of a document and putting them in the same folder on the shelf. It doesn’t make sense. If one gets physically damaged, chances are both will.

So when I sat down to finally set up my long-overdue online backup, I had certain criteria that I needed to follow:

• It needed to be free, or darn close to it.
• It had to be as simple and pain-free as possible.
• It needed to be reliable.
• It needed to be automatic. I didn’t want to have to constantly be copying files over to the “backup folder” or anything.

So I found Syncplicity, and my search was over.

Syncplicity is a beautiful program. It works for XP users, Vista users (and all you Vista users are going to need it!), and even Mac users as well. You can install Syncplicity, set it up, and have your files backed up before you even figure out how to pronounce their stinking name. Here’s how you can set yours up today and finally enjoy the peace of mind that comes with online backup.

Sign up for a Syncplicity account and install the software.

Syncplicity has two plans: a free plan and a paid one. I use the free one, and it’s all I need – 2 GB of online storage. The free plan also comes with the ability to sync files across 2 different computers. This is incredibly handy if you have a home desktop computer and a laptop that you take on the road. When you use their service, you can automatically have a copy of each document or file stored on both computers. Nice and easy.

Tell Syncplicity which folders to keep backed up.

With Syncplicity, you don’t need to sit and make copies of files all the time. You don’t even need a separate backup folder. The only thing you have to do is tell the program which folders to watch. Syncplicity will automatically back up any files and subfolders in your designated folders. Plus, if you make any changes to a document, the program will back up the new version immediately after you hit the “Save” button. This is the definition of “no muss, no fuss”.

That’s it!

Now, anything that’s backed up will have a little green checkmark next to it, showing you it’s safe. Syncplicity will also be running in the background, taking up very little resources and backing up everything on-the-go. As you make changes, they are being saved. It doesn’t get much simpler than that!

Syncplicity also has extra features, such as easy file and folder sharing with friends, and automatic Facebook integration for pictures that you back up with the program. Check out Syncplicity’s website for more information and to sign up. Do you already have a favorite online backup solution that we should know about? Share it in the comments!

Get great, practical advice sent straight to your inbox every week! For more information on The Practical Nerd Rules for Life, click here. Plus, learn how you can get a copy of my FREE ebook!

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