1. Open Source software e.g. Microsoft office Professional cost Approximately £300 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Office-2007-Professional- PC/dp/B000HEV6ES/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1266221942&sr=1-4 This product can be installed on two computers; however, the second license can only be used by the same user on a portable device Consider Open Office which is free http://www.openoffice.org/product/

2. Open office A free open systems equivalent to Microsoft office – will read and write Word doc files, Powerpoint files, etc. · Openoffice Writer word processor similar to MS Word · Openoffice Impress presentation program similar to MS Powerpoint, e.g. this presentation · Openoffice Calc spreadsheet similar to MS Excel · Openoffice Base database similar to MS Access · Openoffice Draw vector graphics editor similar to CorelDRAW and Microsoft Visio · Openoffice Math mathematical equation editor similar to MS Equation Editor

3. Also Project-Open - Web-based ERP/Project Management http://www.project-open.com/ Gantt project - creation of gantt charts and associated documenets http://www.ganttproject.biz/

4. TrueCrypt Free open soource on-the-fly disk encryption software http://www.truecrypt.org/ Can encrypt complete disks, disk partitions, USB drives, create encrypted containers, etc Encrypted containers see http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~bb/TrueCrypt/TrueCryptContainer.html Encrypted USB flash drive see http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~bb/TrueCrypt/TrueCryptUSBpen.html

5. ArgoUML – http://argouml.tigris.org/ enables the creation of use-case and class diagrams (needs Java) UMLet - http://qse.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~auer/umlet/ tool for creating UML diagrams (needs java) this will also work as a plug-in for eclipse Eclipse - http://www.eclipse.org/ a powerful open source IDE for multiple language

6. The Code::Blocks programming environment uses the GNU gcc/g++ C/C++ 32-bit compiler under Windows, Linux, iMacs, etc. http://www.codeblocks.org/ With wxSmith GUI builderwxSmith An alternative to Matlab is GNU Octave http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/