Microsoft Office is an option, but it’s not free (the Home and Student edition currently costs £60) and it will run slowly on older computers. Fortunately there are alternatives which won’t cost you a penny and are better suited to less powerful hardware.

Google Apps

http://docs.google.com

Google provides a free word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application, all of which run inside your web browser. Because the apps are browser-based, they don’t need much in the way of computing horsepower and this makes them ideal for anybody using an older PC. Another benefit is that it doesn’t matter what operating system your PC has, so long as you have a web browser.

Google Docs offer all of the features you would expect from modern office applications and should be capable of handling most of the kind of work that the majority of people will need to do.

By default, Google Docs saves all of your files online so that you can access them easily from any computer with web access simply by logging into your account. You can also save local copies of the document in a range of popular file formats, including those compatible with MS Office. Google Docs can also open most MS Office files.

The only real weak point of Google Docs is that it stops working if your internet connection ever goes offline.

OpenOffice

http://www.openoffice.org

Open Office is a free alternative to MS Office and is one of the most popular free applications in the world. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation application, graphics editor and database. It’s fully compatible with MS Office and runs on Windows, Mac or Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu.

The current version (3.1) of Open Office is a powerful, fully featured application suite designed for relatively modern PCs, so you’ll need 512Mb of memory to run it at a reasonable speed. However, the website offers an archive of previous versions which can run on older computers – the first version of the software is able to run on an original Pentium processor with 64Mb of memory.

AbiWord

http://www.abisource.com

If all you need is a straightforward word processor and you don’t want to clog up your hard disk with unnecessary applications that you won’t use, then AbiWord is ideal. AbiWord is a popular free word processor that offers all of the features that most users will ever need and is fully compatible with the latest version of MS Word, so you won’t have any problems reading documents sent by other people.

The application has fairly low system requirements and should run comfortably on an original Pentium processor with 16MB of memory. It runs on any version of Windows from 95 onwards, and is also available for Mac OS X, Ubuntu or any other Linux based operating system.

The good news is that there are high quality, free alternatives to Windows, and most of them work a lot better on older computers than Windows does.  There are hundreds of free operating systems, so we’ll just list the best and most popular below. In order to install any of them on your PC, you will need to download a copy and burn it onto a CD, so if you don’t have a working PC with CD burner at home you’ll need to find a friend who can help with this.

Ubuntu

http://www.ubuntu.com/

Ubuntu is without a doubt the most popular free operating system for desktop/laptop computers. Hundreds of skilled and enthusiastic computer programmers contribute to making Ubuntu a secure, powerful and stable system, so much so that many people prefer it over Windows. You can install Ubuntu in under half an hour and it will usually recognise all of your hardware automatically, so you should be up and running quickly and smoothly.

Ubuntu comes with office applications, a media player, web browser, chat client and pretty much everything else you might need for day-to-day computing

It’s a little different to Windows, but most people should have no problems figuring out how to use Ubuntu since it’s designed to be very user friendly. If you run into difficulties, there’s a wealth of documentation online and a huge user community where you can find lots of knowledgeable people to help with your questions.

Ubuntu should work well on even quite old and low powered PCs – as a minimum we would recommend a 700Mz processor, 256Mb of memory and 8Gb of free hard disk space. If you have lower specifications than this, we recommend trying Xubuntu instead, which is a version of Ubuntu designed to work better on even older PCs.

ReactOS

http://www.reactos.org

Ubuntu is a great system, but it might be a bit too much of a leap for some people who can’t wrench themselves away from Windows. So, how do you get Windows without paying for it? ReactOS is the answer, it’s a completely free operating system which is designed to be a clone of Windows XP.

This means that anybody who knows how to use Windows will have no problems understanding how ReactOS works, and more importantly the system is compatible with a lot of Windows software, including some popular games such as Quake III, Unreal Tournament and Diablo 2. The website has a compatibility database, listing 572 Windows games, applications and device drivers.

An important point to remember is that ReactOS is still not finished. While it’s relatively stable and usable, the system is still very much in its early days so you will most likely encounter a few glitches that haven’t been fixed. That said, it’s still the closest thing you can get to Windows without paying.

Puppy Linux

http://puppylinux.org

Puppy Linux is well known as a lightweight operating system, meaning that it has very low system requirements so that it runs quickly even on quite old computers. The minimum system requirements for Puppy Linux are a 166Mhz Pentium processor and 128Mb of memory, so a PC manufactured as long ago as 1995 should run the system fairly well.

Puppy Linux uses an easy to understand point and click graphical interface, and comes with all of the basic applications you will need for day-to-day computing activities. The whole system occupies less than 100Mb and you don’t even need to install it to a hard drive since it can be started from CD or a memory stick.

The only potential issue is that Puppy Linux might struggle to automatically recognise some wireless internet adaptors, but there’s a helpful discussion forum with a section just for beginners where you’ll be able to get assistance if this is the case.

Damn Small Linux

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org

If you’ve got a really old PC, from about 1990 onwards, Damn Small Linux is a good option since it is even more lightweight than Puppy Linux, but still manages to offer an easy to use point-and-click graphical interface, not too dissimilar to Windows. Damn Small Linux should run reasonably well on a 486DX2 processor and 16Mb of memory.

Again, there may be some issues with automatically recognising and configuring some types of WiFi adaptor, but there’s plenty of help and information on the website if you run into problems.

Honourable mention: FreeDOS

http://www.freedos.org

Once we go back in time beyond the nineties, PC hardware from that era isn’t really capable of running the kind of graphical operating systems like Windows that everybody is used to these days, so things start to get a bit more technical and less user-friendly. If you’ve got a pre-1990 PC your best bet for an operating system that will be able to run any kind of useful software is FreeDOS – a clone of the most popular operating system of the time.

You will need to learn how to use a PC by entering text commands instead of clicking on things with a mouse, but the basics are easy enough to master. The important point is that there is a massive library of software available to run on FreeDOS