Useful free software for a 12-year-old?
February 20, 2010 4:43 PM Subscribe
Refurbishing an old laptop for use by a friend's 12-year-old daughter. Looking for free software suggestions, any other tips you care to offer. Laptop will mostly be used for schoolwork and freeing up mom's laptop while daughter checks email and chats with friends.
House was robbed, daughter's Macbook was stolen, mom doesn't have the resources right now to replace it. I have an old Dell D400 running XP Pro that I don't use for anything other than watching Hulu. No licenses for anything other than the OS, so free is key.
She reads email via webmail, so that's not an issue. Have Firefox and Chrome, Foxit, downloading OpenOffice. Anything out there like OpenOffice that might be more kid-friendly? I seem to recall OO having s somewhat steep learning curve.
Perplexed as to which image manipulating software would be the most kid-friendly. Anything else I am missing? Anything cool out there for free that a 12-year-old might find useful or interesting?
House was robbed, daughter's Macbook was stolen, mom doesn't have the resources right now to replace it. I have an old Dell D400 running XP Pro that I don't use for anything other than watching Hulu. No licenses for anything other than the OS, so free is key.
She reads email via webmail, so that's not an issue. Have Firefox and Chrome, Foxit, downloading OpenOffice. Anything out there like OpenOffice that might be more kid-friendly? I seem to recall OO having s somewhat steep learning curve.
Perplexed as to which image manipulating software would be the most kid-friendly. Anything else I am missing? Anything cool out there for free that a 12-year-old might find useful or interesting?
And I'd say OpenOffice should be a snap for any 12 year old who is used to her own Mac.
posted by fish tick at 5:10 PM on February 20, 2010
posted by fish tick at 5:10 PM on February 20, 2010
Best answer: There's GIMP as a photoshop-like piece of software. Hydrogen is a free drum machine (designed for linux but has an experimental windows version too) that she might like to play with if she's into music. Winamp is a free music player but you might also try iTunes.
You'll probably want an antivirus program; avast! offers a quality free antivirus for personal use.
posted by axiom at 5:11 PM on February 20, 2010
You'll probably want an antivirus program; avast! offers a quality free antivirus for personal use.
posted by axiom at 5:11 PM on February 20, 2010
You could consider Paint.net for image manipulation (I don't find it very complex).
For schoolwork I suppose it depends whether the work will be handed in on paper or digitally. If the latter, file format compatibility would be important.
Between Firefox add-ons and apps in the cloud there's an awful lot available through the browser these days to keep her occupied (Pandora Radio for instance).
posted by forthright at 5:21 PM on February 20, 2010
For schoolwork I suppose it depends whether the work will be handed in on paper or digitally. If the latter, file format compatibility would be important.
Between Firefox add-ons and apps in the cloud there's an awful lot available through the browser these days to keep her occupied (Pandora Radio for instance).
posted by forthright at 5:21 PM on February 20, 2010
I regularly use these free programs:
Ashampoo burning Studio 6 (for burning/ripping Cds and DVDs)
Auslogic Disk Defrag (superfast hard disk defrag)
CCleaner (clean hard drive and registry)
VLC media player (prefer over bloated Windows Media Player)
Adobe Reader Lite (to open and read PDFs. I like the lite version over the bloated memory hog regular version)
Download Accelerator Plus (or any other free download accelerator).
posted by luvmywife at 5:45 PM on February 20, 2010
Ashampoo burning Studio 6 (for burning/ripping Cds and DVDs)
Auslogic Disk Defrag (superfast hard disk defrag)
CCleaner (clean hard drive and registry)
VLC media player (prefer over bloated Windows Media Player)
Adobe Reader Lite (to open and read PDFs. I like the lite version over the bloated memory hog regular version)
Download Accelerator Plus (or any other free download accelerator).
posted by luvmywife at 5:45 PM on February 20, 2010
Best answer: Adding to my previous comment, ImgBurn has a nice point and click interface for CD/DVD imaging and burning.
Also I agree with your choice of FoxIt for PDF viewing. I was never so happy to be a FoxIt user as early this year when many of my friends and relatives got hit by the Adobe Reader exploits.
posted by forthright at 6:07 PM on February 20, 2010
Also I agree with your choice of FoxIt for PDF viewing. I was never so happy to be a FoxIt user as early this year when many of my friends and relatives got hit by the Adobe Reader exploits.
posted by forthright at 6:07 PM on February 20, 2010
Best answer: There's also gimpshop which a version of GIMP that's designed to mimic photoshop's menus and UI.
Having a good image manipulation tool, IMO, is essential. I don't know how people get by without being able to edit pictures.
If she's really into computer art, you could also get her a copy of blender for 3d editing. Now that's a program with a steep learning curve, but kids are actually better at climbing those curves then adults, IMO.
VLC is great.
posted by delmoi at 6:20 PM on February 20, 2010
Having a good image manipulation tool, IMO, is essential. I don't know how people get by without being able to edit pictures.
If she's really into computer art, you could also get her a copy of blender for 3d editing. Now that's a program with a steep learning curve, but kids are actually better at climbing those curves then adults, IMO.
VLC is great.
posted by delmoi at 6:20 PM on February 20, 2010
Response by poster: I was thinking, too, that perhaps the best thing would be to download the basics, take care of security and all that jazz, talk to her mother about it, and maybe just bookmark this thread and say "here are some options, what do you want to do?" That way she gets the surprise of a "new" laptop, but also gets to take ownership of the thing and have fun exploring, learning, and creating her own experience.
Thank you for your suggestions so far!
posted by halcyon_daze at 6:20 PM on February 20, 2010
Thank you for your suggestions so far!
posted by halcyon_daze at 6:20 PM on February 20, 2010
Ask her what format she was using to submit school papers before her Mac was stolen. Was she using the Mac version of Office?
In my experience, the conversion between OpenOffice and MS Office is trivial, but teachers in middle schools are not always known for their tech savvy.
Point her toward FreeFileConvert. I've had fine results with it.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 6:23 PM on February 20, 2010
In my experience, the conversion between OpenOffice and MS Office is trivial, but teachers in middle schools are not always known for their tech savvy.
Point her toward FreeFileConvert. I've had fine results with it.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 6:23 PM on February 20, 2010
Irfanview for all picture viewing? I've used it for years!
And Picasa if she has a digital camera.
posted by lungtaworld at 6:50 PM on February 20, 2010 [1 favorite]
And Picasa if she has a digital camera.
posted by lungtaworld at 6:50 PM on February 20, 2010 [1 favorite]
If she's game, you might try installing Ubuntu Linux, which comes with a good range of open-source applications (including Open Office and Gimp), is snappy even on older hardware, and doesn't have the security issues of Windows. I recently got a low-powered netbook and was torn between keeping the Ubuntu distribution that came on it and Hackintoshing it. I opted for the latter, so I could run OmniFocus, but it was a close call. (Several months later, I've decided that the netbook isn't really ideal for running all the Mac OS software I need, I'm planning to reinstall Ubuntu on it and use it as a travel machine.)
Of course, if she's used to the Mac OS and you don't mind fiddling with the BIOS and such, you could always Hackintosh the Dell....
posted by brianogilvie at 7:29 PM on February 20, 2010
Of course, if she's used to the Mac OS and you don't mind fiddling with the BIOS and such, you could always Hackintosh the Dell....
posted by brianogilvie at 7:29 PM on February 20, 2010
OpenOffice is awesome -- and works almost exactly like Microsoft Office, WordPerfect for Windows and just about any other WYSIWYG word processing program.
There is no necessary conversion between OO and MS Office - she can set the defaults to save files as either RTF (readable by just about everything) or MS format (.doc). OO's own format is .ods (Open Document something), but it works perfectly well just saving as the .doc format; I'm editting a document in that format right now with OO. And the latest update will read .docx, which is not true for Word2000 (which a lot of people are still using).
OO also has a better spreadsheet program than MS Office. Teach her about spreadsheets -- everyone should know how to play with them.
Picasa is an excellent low-key image program -- for sorting photos, and doing basic clean up. It's not a real image manipulation program if you want to do things like play with levels. I use it all the time, you just need to recognise the limitations. I found it easier to work with than Irfanview.
posted by jb at 7:31 PM on February 20, 2010
There is no necessary conversion between OO and MS Office - she can set the defaults to save files as either RTF (readable by just about everything) or MS format (.doc). OO's own format is .ods (Open Document something), but it works perfectly well just saving as the .doc format; I'm editting a document in that format right now with OO. And the latest update will read .docx, which is not true for Word2000 (which a lot of people are still using).
OO also has a better spreadsheet program than MS Office. Teach her about spreadsheets -- everyone should know how to play with them.
Picasa is an excellent low-key image program -- for sorting photos, and doing basic clean up. It's not a real image manipulation program if you want to do things like play with levels. I use it all the time, you just need to recognise the limitations. I found it easier to work with than Irfanview.
posted by jb at 7:31 PM on February 20, 2010
Response by poster: brianogilvie, I considered Ubuntu because it's a package, and because of the obvious "cool" factor, but was concerned it would bork the wireless internet adaptor or something like that. But I seem to remember now that you can boot from the cd, so perhaps I will look into that and see how it runs.
posted by halcyon_daze at 8:35 PM on February 20, 2010
posted by halcyon_daze at 8:35 PM on February 20, 2010
Best answer: My 12-year-old's boot drive poofed and I loaded Ubuntu onto the new drive to salvage data off the bad drive. I could have re-installed XP from the moribund recovery partition but she asked me if it was going to make her computer "as slow as it was before". In the few day's transition, she'd realized that she could do everything she did before but without so much waiting.
She'd already been living mostly inside Chrome, Google Docs so that writing followed her from school to home, Picassa for her snapshots, and now she doesn't have to use that wretched iTunes to keep her iPod fed but uses Rhythmbox instead. And it seems to give her "geek cred" among her friends in the way that having the first iPhone on the schoolyard might have. Kids these days...
posted by fydfyd at 9:34 PM on February 20, 2010 [1 favorite]
She'd already been living mostly inside Chrome, Google Docs so that writing followed her from school to home, Picassa for her snapshots, and now she doesn't have to use that wretched iTunes to keep her iPod fed but uses Rhythmbox instead. And it seems to give her "geek cred" among her friends in the way that having the first iPhone on the schoolyard might have. Kids these days...
posted by fydfyd at 9:34 PM on February 20, 2010 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Seconding paint.net for powerful but relatively intuitive image manipulation. Nthing the VLC recommendation.
For antivirus, these days I use Microsoft Security Essentials. It is free, fast, no-nag, provides solid protection, and is simple enough for my mom to use (so a 12 year old ought to be fine).
posted by zjacreman at 11:03 PM on February 20, 2010
For antivirus, these days I use Microsoft Security Essentials. It is free, fast, no-nag, provides solid protection, and is simple enough for my mom to use (so a 12 year old ought to be fine).
posted by zjacreman at 11:03 PM on February 20, 2010
http://www.tuxpaint.org/ is pretty cool
posted by TimeDoctor at 12:51 AM on February 21, 2010
posted by TimeDoctor at 12:51 AM on February 21, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by fish tick at 5:01 PM on February 20, 2010