A few days before Christmas, my computer crashed and burned. My entire livelihood was suddenly on the line, so you better believe I was scrambling around at all hours to get everything set up and running on a brand new computer!

The dust has pretty much finally settled down from that incident, but I’ve found out that some programs don’t work as well (if at all) running on Windows Vista as they did with Windows XP.

Unfortunately, Dreamweaver MX was one of those programs. I couldn’t even get the damn thing to finish installing itself! Instead of dealing with the whole hassle of it all, I decided to seek out some free alternatives to the software.

I’d heard of NVU (it’s pronounced like N-View) before, but since I was already using Dreamweaver there was no need to check out the open source software. Now that I’ve had a chance to download it and play with it, I can say that it’s a very impressive application for the price (free)! It has both graphical and text/source code editing capabilities, which is what I loved so much about Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is the Cadillac of HTML editors, but NVU is a really good alternative. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can download NVU here.

Now, the only other thing needed was a graphics editing program to replace Fireworks MX. Enter GIMP. It’s available for free and it can be used for a wide variety of tasks such as photo retouching, banner creation, image creation and works on a variety of operating systems. I don’t use a graphics program very often, but every affiliate marketer needs one from time to time. I found it to be similar enough to Fireworks to be able to use fairly intuitively and quickly without having to read any documentation. Highly recommended! Download GIMP free of charge here.