One of the things I do in my mandatory appointed role as my family’s IT support is make sure they steer clear of trouble by using alternative software whenever possible. By avoiding programs with severe problems or HUGE security risks you’ll save your family a lot of frustration, stress and headaches. Not to mention saving yourself a lot of frustration, stress and headaches because now they don’t have to call you for help as much.

Internet Explorer, for example is NOT allowed for anything but Windows Update. Instead of IE for web-browsing, they use Seamonkey (or Firefox before it became a memory hog and bloated).

You also won’t find them using any form of Outlook or Windows Live Mail to send emails. They either use any of the various web-based mails like Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail and if they want a desktop email client they use Thunderbird.

And don’t go looking for paid anti-virus like Norton’s (ack), McAfee (hurl) or Kasperky anywhere on their system, because Avast! saves the day for them every time, for free, using far less memory and resources so their computers act like computers and not laggy, glorified toasters.

The benefit to being your family’s life-long, mandatory appointed IT tech support is that you get to steer them to safer alternative software like Seamonkey, Thunderbird and Avast! and this results in them being much safer when they browse the web, send emails to everyone or open that file that their kid downloaded off of that ing Facebook website.

Not only are they safer this way, but believe me, it cuts down on the phone calls!

So what alternative software does your family use? Or are you constantly getting a lot of calls because they use Internet Explorer, Outlook and Norton’s?