Many people have switched to the popular web based email solutions like Yahoo and GMail, they are FREE and provide many features not found in most desktop email clients. However, they don't work well from inside Windows.
If you click an email link on a web page, or chose "Send Email" from word or many other desktop applications Windows will most likely start outlook, thunderbird or whatever you have installed as your desktop email client.
Affixa (http://www.affixa.com) is a free desktop program that nicely solves this problem, it allows you to use you web mail service from within Windows just as if it were a desktop email client. It supports drag-n-drop allowing you to collect documents, integrates with a number of file sharing hosts (allowing you to send large files), and a bunch of other featrues.
Free for personal use, a commercial licence is only ~$4/year.
Check it out.
Desktop Integration of Web Mail
Over 60 Free Webinars/Workshops in July!!! These free workshops span health, personal growth, business, spirituality and societal change, and are designed to unleash your full potential.
http://events.linkedin.com/MaestroMonth/pub/88291
really great stuff Check it out!!
Summary
INTERACTIVE LEARNING EVENTS WITH FAMOUS THOUGHT LEADERS
In July, we're turning the page on boring, passive teleseminars. In their place: rewarding, interactive learning events during which attendees interact with each other. It's called Maestro Month: a celebration of learning and personal development.
All month long, you'll have direct access to thought leaders such as Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield, Marianne Williamson, Michael Port, John Gray, Neale Donald Walsch, and 60+ more. These free workshops span health, personal growth, business, spirituality and societal change, and are designed to unleash your full potential.
Don't have the budget for
QuarkXPress, Adobe
InDesign, or Microsoft Publisher? Check out Serif
PagePlus SE! Its a
backlevel version of
their commercial PagePlus X3, but is an
outstanding application that is very easy to use and loaded with templates. The free SE version
unfortunately is only available on Windows and won't run under vista. This is the only program I
truly miss since migrating to Vista
earlier this year.
If you need to run on Linux, MAC OS, or Vista and want the advanced features and
commercial output formats and are willing to trade off the steeper learning curve check out
Scribus. The documentation is great but it will take some time to master. You also need to use
GIMP or something like it for editing graphics, GIMP is an open source alternative to
PhotoShop/
PaintShopPro but that is a find for another day.
Free Desktop Publishing Program to produce everything from Business Cards, to Brochures, and mailings.
This suite of Free PDF Tools allows you tweak and edit the many PDF's you will likely create or receive now that you have an easy way to
PDF Almost Anything. Check out
PDF Fill Tools it is very easy to sue and has all the features you might need (split/Merge, reorder pages, rotate pages, add header and footer with page number, add watermark watermark and more..) you can read full details of all the features on their site
here. They even claim to support it, if you have problems but I have not tested it out.
I have the Full licenced version of Adobe Acrobat and I have not even bothered to install it on my new computer. I get 95% of the function I need from these tools. The only real thing I miss is being able to annotate the images with callouts etc, but its an easy enough workaround with these tools and image editor. My favorite image editor is my screen capture tool but that is a recommenation for another day!
One note of caution - they do bundle with with a Paid PDF Editor they woudl love you to buy and thre is no way to selectivly install or remove it for the novice. You can just ignore it, if you want to delete you will have to do it manually.
http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html
FREE PDF Tools
Ever want to do a survey to get feedback your goods/services, guage interest, or just about anything. Want a fully featured online survey tool that is FREE that does not put limits on number of invites, lets you download results, provides both anonymous and tracked surveys and much more? Here is a great free tool -
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/
Free Survey Tool
With so much of everyones critical information stored on personal computers especially for individuals and small businesses it is imperative you have a good backup strategy! What would you lose if your hard drive crashed? How would you recover your tax returns, customer invoices, address book, financial records, emails, customer presentations or your docteral thesis? You can get the applications again but if you lose your data it may be difficult if not impossible to recover.
There are a number of FREE alternatives that can provide basic protection of these critical files and information.
EMail - use a free online mail provider that gives you enough online storage to allow you save almost every email. I like
GMAIL however there are a number of other alternatives such as Yahoo, AIM etc.. You can continue to use Outlook, Thunderbird or your other favorite desktop mail client you don't have to use the WEB interface. If you go this route - I highly recommend using and IMAP connection as it mirrors all changes on each client you use to access you mail.
Local Backup
- Traditional Backup - GFI Backup (Formerly Titan Backup) is a great backup client supporting networked drives, automated scheduling and more has recently been released as freeware. This is by far the best FREE solution I have ever tried and is better than many paid solutions and certainly much better than the solution included in windows.
- Image Backup - Macrium Reflect is my choice here. Image backups differ from more traditional file backups is that they take an image of th computers drive(s) that you can recover to later. The advantage of this is that you don't have to reinstall applications. It used to be that you had to restore the whole image as the only option. Most of the contenders now allow you to Mount the images and virtual drives and recover individual files if you need to. I personally use Acronis True Image but its not free unless your lucky enough to catch it on Giveawayoftheday
Online/Offsite Backup - A wise man once said if its worth backing it up, back it up at least twice. What happens if your house burns down?
idrive Is one of the best free solutions out there is my favoite. It offers 2GB of online storeage that you can be expanded to 12GB by referring your friends. It offers a free desktop client as well as an explorer plugin so can your your online storage right from your desktop. There are many options for this service and it is changing quickly some are better at sharing, others give more space etc... - you can see some of the others including one with unlimited online storage here at a review I'm working on.
Free Local/Online/Offsite Backup
Do you have trouble finding receipts when you need them? Do you dread getting ready for your taxes because it means that you need to organize and total all of your receipts that have been piling up in your drawer?
Shoeboxed.com Offers a fabulous free service where you can email electronic or scanned images of your receipts and allows you categorize, store and access them online.
Premium subscriptions let you drop receipts in the mail and they will scan and load them for you!
Organize and Store your Receipts online
