For your general coursework, you don't need a whole lot of computer software. In fact, you really don't need anything you have to pay for, but I'll get back to that in a minute. In this chapter, I'll let you know about a few options for computer software you'll need for the classroom portion of your medical school career.
Hopefully at least some of you heard about this last year, but Microsoft was selling their Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition for $59.95. This offer was restarted again on August 20th, 2008. This software sells retail for $679 (91% savings). The deal is restricted to students (enrolled at least half-time) at any US higher education institution. As previously, this deal is only available for Windows XP or Vista users. You can purchase it at the Ultimate Steal website.
In order to buy it, you must enter your school email address. They will email you a password and instructions. Once you've logged in, you will be able to purchase Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95. You can either choose to download it (for free) and burn it to a CD or you can choose to have it shipped to you on a DVD for a "nominal" fee ($12.95). If you choose to download it, you will only be able to download it once. If you are worried that you will need to re-download it at some point, you can purchase the "Extended Download Service", which will allow you to download it as many times as you like for the next 2 years. Please note that you will only be given 1 product key, so you won't be able to download 50 copies and give it to all your friends and family or install it on more than 1 computer. If you want to do that, see the next section.
(I admit. That's a horrible pun.) OpenOffice.org is a completely free/open-source office suite. It's available for almost any platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and in over 20 languages. This software is perfectly capable of handling any task required by med school. In fact, I think it's a perfectly good option for almost every student. It's even got some nice features not found in MS Office. For example, you can convert any document to a PDF. If you are not one of the few users that truly uses MS Office 2007's "special features," I think you'll be perfectly happy using OpenOffice. In fact, version 3.0 (released Oct, 13, 2008) will even allow you to open those darn OOXML files that MS Office 2007 uses by default. That way when someone sends you one of those pesky .docx files you'll be able to open it.
A word of warning is needed, however. The default file format of OpenOffice is the Open Document Format (a true open standard). If you plan on using OpenOffice.org to complete homework assignments you must either "Save As" an MS Word file (.doc) or convert it to a PDF. If you turn in your biochem paper as a .odt file (the default), Dr. Cs-Szabo will not be amused. She will most likely be using MS Office, which doesn't support .odt files. You can change the default file format to .doc if you want via the Preferences. If you'd like to try OpenOffice but are unsure about something, leave a comment here or send me an email.
The good news is, the viewers all free. The PDF viewer tends to be a Windows issue, since it does not to come with PDF support out of the box. Most people prefer the regular old Adobe Reader. Some Windows users prefer FoxIt Reader. If you want FOSS on Windows, you could always try Sumatra.
Some Windows users may also want to be able to "print to PDF". I recommend doPDF (freeware) or PDFCreator (FOSS).
Don't worry. I'm not leaving out Mac and Linux. Mac and Linux users should have PDF viewing and printing support out of the box.
All the Mac users are scoffing, even though they lost the PWN-2-OWN contest a few months ago. But at least for Windows Users, antivirus is important. There's the usual slew of commericial products like Symantec and McAfee. I just thought I'd mention AVG, Avast and ClamWin. ClamWin does not include a real-time scanner, so if you open a virus, ClamWin won't see it. It only scans what you tell it to scan. Don't worry Linux users, you're ok for now.
Between GoogleTalk/GoogleChat, FacebookChat, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, and other services, there are a lot of IM programs to use. Why not try out an instant messaging program that uses multiple protocols. Pidgin works well on Windows and Linux. It supports Facebook chat via a plugin. For Macs Adium works nicely, and it has Facebook chat support built into the newest version.
PortableApps is a great resource for anyone using public computers at Rush. Let's just say the applications selection on Rush computers leaves something to be desired. PortableApps is a small application that can be installed on a USB drive. It lets you bring all of your favorite open-source applications with you wherever you go. This includes Firefox, games, any instant messaging service (via Pidgin), and even a CD/DVD burning program. This is a great piece of software for students who are constantly using public computers where you can't install applications yourself. You'll need to be on a Windows machine to install it to your thumb drive.
There is a small trick to getting Flash to work in Firefox for PortableApps. First, make sure Firefox is installed and working on PortableApps. Also if you don't have a zip program, download and install the 7zip PortableApp. Then download this xpi file from Macromedia (right-click, Save Target As) and save it to your USB drive. Then extract the contents (using 7zip or other extractor) to the /App/firefox/plugins folder on your USB drive. Make sure to restart Firefox if you have it open and you should be good to go.
If you have the need to run another operating system from within your normal one, you have a few options. The most common example of this is a Mac user wanting to run Windows inside OS X for one reason or another. My personal choice for this task on any operating system is VirtualBox. This software is completely free of charge and it comes in 2 flavors: Open Source Edition (OSE) and Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). The only difference between the 2 is that the PUEL version contains a few additional features, like USB devices in the virtual machine. The only people I would not recommend VirtualBox to are people who want to play hardcore Windows games, since it does not support hardware acceleration. VMWare workstation and Parallels are both commercial products available to purchase. Parallels does have some support for hardware acceleration if you're looking to game. Note that if you're trying to run Windows inside a virtual machine, you will need to purchase a Windows license.
For more information on how to access and view Rush lecture recordings, go to the Lecture Recordings page.