Recently I got the opportunity to work on my spare old laptop (an IBM think pad 1.3GHz); I wanted to give it a good clean out, which I did, I generally don't use it at all.

I'd been having lots of discussion with colleges at work about open-source software, and decided to see what a now “clean” PC with nothing but open source could potentially do.

The Alternatives:

First off, I installed OpenOffice.org 3.0, imagine this as the alternative to Microsoft...