Sites we have found useful

Great Software

The following are programs that we have found useful. This is all software that we have personal experience of and are happy to recommend as a good product and as good value.

Protection from Spam, viruses and phishing

The best way of dealing with Spam, Viruses and Phishing attempts that we have found so far. There is also a free version of mailwasher for use with a single email account.

Anti virus software

Anti-virus protection that doesn't take over your PC, the free version; AVG Free anti-virus is also offers a good level of anti-virus protection for home use.

Business Tools

MSGTAG Tags your emails so you can tell when they have been read. Not 100% reliable but much better than any other method we know of. We use this so that we know when a B&B guest has received our booking confirmation.
There is a free version which is good enough for most purposes but we use MSGTAGstatus which keeps track of all our outgoing emails.

Free Software

There are lots of great products out there which cost nothing, the software listed below isn't poor quality or out of date versions, these are fine products that just happen to be produced by people who think that software should be free. In many cases the supplier asks for a donation to help keep the work going, I would encourage you to make donations for this software. Donations keep the programmers going and the software is still a bargain compared to commercial equivalents.

Thunderbird

Firefox

Opera

A fully functional suite of office applications including Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawing, Database and even a special module for dealing with mathematical expressions. It can read and write the files created by other office applications like MS Word or Excel so there is no problem with sharing files with other people.

Reasonably Priced Software

Taxcalc