Fortunately, the internet is a gold-mine of free tech support and there are thousands of websites where you’ll find knowledgeable people willing to share their advice and help you solve your problems. Before we talk about where exactly you’ll be able to find free online tech support, it’s worth mentioning a few ground rules which will make it easier for you to find help.

1)      Always be polite, patient and friendly with the people who you are asking for help and advice. This may sound simple, but it’s surprising how often people forget this rule. If you treat people with respect, they will be far more likely to invest their time in helping you.

2)      Provide as much information as possible about your system – write down as much detail as you can find about your computer: the type of processor, how much memory, the model of graphics card, etc. And the same goes for software, make sure you know the name and version number of your operating system and any software you are using. It’s much easier to diagnose technical problems when you have all of this information available.

3)      Show willingness to learn – techies find it much more satisfying to help people who are trying to figure out problems for themselves rather than fixing things for people who clearly aren’t interested in learning how to solve the issue.

Where to find free tech help

Manufacturer web site – most hardware and software manufacturers (both commercial and free/open source) will have a website, and usually there will be a discussion forum where you can ask for help from the manufacturers own support staff, or from other users who are experts.

User groups and fan sites – if the manufacturer does not have a discussion forum on their own website, quite often you will find unofficial forums set up by users of the product in question, and these are usually great places to find technical experts. Do a Google search for the brand name along with the word “forum” to find relevant sites.

Dedicated tech help sites – there are plenty of websites where good Samaritans provide free tech support for general technical problems. A few examples are:

• http://www.techguy.org/
• http://www.5starsupport.com/
• http://www.techsupportforum.com

Yahoo! Answers – a great service which allows you to pose questions to the general public. Set up an account and submit your question (remembering to include as much information as possible) to the ‘Computers and Internet’ section, and within a day or two you’ll usually get a few different possible answers.

Google – nine times out of ten when you encounter a technical problem somebody else has already had the same difficulty and tried to find an answer online. By entering a few keywords that are relevant to your difficulty (along with the word “problem”) into Google, you will quite often find a forum discussion or blog post covering exactly the problem you’re having.

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

Businesses and many well-off individuals like to keep their PCs up to date with the latest software, which usually means that they have to replace their computers every two or three years in order to make sure the hardware is capable of running the latest version of Windows or MS Office. So every year millions of old computers need to be got rid of.

PCs which are a few years old are usually perfectly serviceable for most people’s needs, but because of the way the computer industry is designed to keep selling businesses newer models, these old machines are practically worthless. Unlike cars, old computers don’t have a lot of moving parts which become unreliable over time – with a little care most PCs can run for several decades.

Where can you find a free PC?

The most obvious place to look for a free computer is in the classified ads. Freecycle is an international website where people list items that they wish to give away at no cost so that others can make use of them, so this is a really good place to start. Alternatively, other classifieds websites such as Gumtree and Loot also have sections listing free items.

There’s an even better place to find free computers – local businesses. As we discussed earlier, businesses usually upgrade their computers every 2-3 years and most companies of any reasonable size will almost always have a few old machines lying around that aren’t being used.

Here’s what most people don’t know about these old PCs: you would actually be doing the company a favour by taking them off their hands. Businesses are legally required to recycle old equipment responsibly, which costs them money – so if they donate a PC to a good cause, they don’t have to pay for it to be recycled.

There are better ways to recycle an old PC

Try writing letters to some of the different companies with offices in your area asking if they would be willing to donate an old computer. It’s important that you tell them you don’t want any software and you are happy for the hard disk drive to be completely erased – software licensing is a tricky issue for businesses, and they wouldn’t want to risk accidentally giving you a hard drive with sensitive business information still on it.

Don’t worry about how the computer will work with its hard drive completely wiped, we will look at free operating systems and other free software in another article.

When you write to the business, explain your situation (are you unemployed, a low paid charity worker, a student, struggling artist, etc) and if possible offer to do something in return for them, such as washing cars, spending a day or two doing odd jobs around the office, etc. The chances are that they won’t want you to do anything in return, but it’s a good idea to show that you’re willing to earn your free PC.

You may get a few rejections, but remember that literally millions of computers are replaced every year by businesses, so keep plugging away and you’re sure to get lucky sooner or later.