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Some Provocative Ideas 

I recently read an article by Woody Leonhardt in the paid version of Windows Secrets (though the article is also freely available in the newsletter archive at http://windowssecrets.com/).

Woody talks about the software you DON’T need once you upgrade to Windows 7. As a happy upgrader (of a laptop and a desktop), I think Woody is on to something. The bottom line of Woody’s article: you don’t need third party (paid or free) anti-virus programs. Simply download and install Microsoft Security Essentials. As an aside I can tell you that my wife and I volunteer in the AARP Foundation Tax Aide program and that program dropped a paid subscription to AVG for thousands of computers in favor of (free) MSE for 2011.

Further according to Woody, you don’t need third-party paid or free disk defraggers. Woody goes into great detail as to how to tell whether Win 7 is set up to do this for you but I would say it is almost impossible that you could have turned this off (since it takes 12 steps to even see its status).

Next, Woody says throw away third party backup programs. Windows 7 has all the backup capability you need though it does take some effort to learn how best to deploy it. You do need to do your homework.

Finally, Woody takes a shot at Open Office. I’m no fan of Microsoft Office (and I’m anything but a serious user) but I’ve never been able to convince myself to jettison it. Woody tells you not to rely on Open Office. My personal solution for the last 10 years has been to install Office 2002 on any new PC since it was the least version that didn’t require activation. Also, as a minimalist user, I’m not aware of any features of Office introduced since 2002 that would cause me to pay the exorbitant price to take advantage of it.

In part 2 of his 3 part series Woody discussed registry cleaners, partitioning software and firewalls as additional software that you really don’t need. I’m looking forward to reading part 3.

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