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Living in Asia

Life: Computers, Internet, and the Outside World

Life: What is it really like to live there, in Asia?

There are many things that can be said. If you want to, do ask questions or share advice on our forums.

Computers: setting up cheap and easy

You can set up a second hand [Japanese, Korean, whatever] computer for free, well, really cheap, but REALLY EASY, too. First, you won't need expensive, difficult, unwieldy, and unreliable Microsoft Windows.

The Operating System (OS): As I said above, you don't need to buy Windows. Locally, you'll never be able to find a genuine version that won't crash because it's pirated. Let's use Linux. gOS is for free, reliable, really easy to use (your grandma can use it) and is multi lingual. Go to http://www.thinkgos.com/. You'll need to have 385mb RAM on the computer as a minimum. It's a simplified version of Linux from: http://www.ubuntu.com/ (which is also for free). However, you might be happier, for the long term with Linspire: http://www.linspire.com/. It's professionally made (buy with a credit card), but it gives you a little more control, and allows you to download more, and install more, than what gOS does. Read on.

Web Browser: If you get gOS (above), FireFox is built in. Firefox is great, in that it blocks many viruses and trojans (evil things) for you, and is more powerful (and still easy to use) than MS Internet Explorer. Firefox is available for Windows and Mac as well, and it's for free. http://www.mozilla.org/.

Word Processor, Spread Sheet, Presentations: This is also for free; try Open Office, which is pre-installed in gOS. You can save in doc, xls, ppt (your favourite MS files), pdf (for adobe), and more. With these files, it's actually more flexible than MS Word. See: http://www.openoffice.org/; download for Linux: http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US (you might need to choose Linux RPM, because it includes JAVA). Also, consider Google Documents, but you need to be online.

E-mail: Try Thunderbird from Mozilla (see above). There is a version for Linux, too. It appears to be very, very similar to Microsoft Outlook Express, but with nice differences. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/all.html. You'll need to get the SMTP for outgoing messages from your internet provider (the company you pay the internet access bill to, this info should be supplied to you in an information package of some sort); and the POP3 for incoming messages info from either hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or whatever). I think gOS has google mail built in to it.

Messaging: I think you can use Windows Live on any platform (OS). But more people are turning to Skype, especially as you can (if you had headphones and mic) make super cheap international calls from your computer to your parents phone (if you had a credit card). Here's the British Linux download page: http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/download/skype/linux/. Pidgin IM, built into gOS, is another program that can allow you to contact your friends on Yahoo, AIM, and Windows Messenger, but I couldn't find the Linux version. Yahoo Messenger doesn't seem to have a Linux version available, either.

Music and Video Players: Whilst I like RealPlayer, their homepage has become annoying, it's harder to find the free version here you should find at the bottom of the list the Linux version. If that link doesn't work, go to RealPlayer.com and look for "Free Player" at the top right corner of the page, that should take you to the download list. RealPlayer allows you to copy CDs onto your computer and convert these to MP3 format for your iPod and other players; you apparently can burn DVDs (but I haven't been able to, yet); you can watch videos, and the news on bbc.com. It's quite versatile. I'm not sure what music and video player gOS has built in (if any).

Good luck, and have fun. If you can, let us know how you go at the forums.

japan, korea, taiwan, asia, homesick