Is it still Open source? I thought Oracle bought it out and closed the source? That's why LibreOffice was formed?
That's not quite correct. Windows Vista/Seven/Eight still have hard disk management practices that allow fragmentation to develop. I troubleshooted some sluggish issues for a friend with Windows 7, and their hard drive was horribly fragmented and with little free space. It took all night to do it, but after the HDD was defragged it ran better. The issue with defragging is not the operating system, but the magnetic/electronic storage media. The new SSD's (solid state drives) are NOT to be defragmented, as they don't need it and running it will actually prematurely wear them out. As for anti-virus, I also used to use AVG (free), but I too found it gradually becoming more of a resource hog with later updates. I now use Avast and it's terrific. MSE did have some problems, but they're pretty aggressive in fixing them. It gets quite a bit of praise from various computer tech forums. Incidentally, CC-Cleaner (Piriform) is great for cleaning up old temp files scattered about the system and for removing old restore points you don't use to reclaim space. But DO NOT use it for cleaning up the registry. All of the experts I've come across on Windows help forums shun it, because most of the time CC-Cleaner will muck around with entries it shouldn't and end up causing problems down the road. Registry fragmentation is generally not a problem any longer with the later versions of Windows. As for Office... I have downloaded and used LibreOffice, one of the open source incarnations of Open Office. It works really well, surprisingly in fact. It's not quite as fully feature rich as Microsoft Office, but if all you need is the basics the open source route is terrific. I've also tested document inter-compatibility and it seems to work well, if you don't use any advanced customizations in MS Office.
I agree with the LibreOffice recommendation. It's worth trying out before buying Office, especially if you're used to Office 2003. LibreOffice feels more like Office 2003 than the newer versions of Office do and very well could be an easier transition. I've used both, and the only thing I've found that I needed that LibreOffice couldn't provide is more than 1024 columns in a spreadsheet. I have a couple of spreadsheets I use that have about 1500 columns, and LibreOffice can't do that, but most people won't ever need more than a few dozen to maybe a couple of hundred columns. Give it a shot and you may save yourself a few hundred dollars.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll look into Libre Office. My question is, do the files have DOC, XLS, and PPT extensions when I save them?