A solution beyond my capabilities. A solution beyond my wishes. A solution that doesn’t answer my question. A solution ... well you get it.
I would love to be running Linux, but I have a computer with megs of stuff and converting would be a real pain.
There’s really nothing to convert. The open-source LibreOffice suite can open all your MS Office docs (Word, PowerPoint, Access, Excel). Digital photos and music files need no conversion.
Nor do you need any special capabilities; I’m nowhere near a computer geek, but Linux has come a long way, looks and functions pretty much like Windows now. The only program I haven’t found a really good Linux alternative for is Quicken. So I still keep a Windows computer for that.
If you have even the slightest interest in trying it out, do what I did. Start gradually. Take an old junk computer (who doesn’t have one of those lying around?), and install a Linux distribution on it. Linux can run great on older hardware; it doesn’t have the bloat that Windows has. I have Linux installed on a ten-year-old desktop, and that thing runs better than my much newer Windows 7 computers at work.
Feel free to FReepmail me if you ever want to give it a go.
What kind of stuff would you have to convert? If it's mostly documents and such, OpenOffce handles MS documents.