Phase 1 - Testing the suite

OK, so I built up my laptop with all that software and did some initial basic testing. It all seems to work OK. The priority was the Antivirus and Firewall first of all. I'm pleasantly surprised that AVG and Zone Alarm appear to function just as well as Norton ever did. AVG certainly intercepted my free supply of trojans that I receive from one of my ISPs without any problems.

Next was to make sure that Thunderbird works OK. My wife and I share a mail account so being able to share the mailbox is important. I found a way to do this by setting up in one user first using the local folders for storage and then making a copy of the profile before setting up the second user. The copied local folders was moved into the 'shared documents' folder and the locations editied inside Thunderbird. It was a bit tricky getting it to work, but, it seems OK, so we'll see how that goes when we go live in couple of weeks time.

Hint for Outlook to Thunderbird switchers: Keep Microsoft Outlook until you've migrated everything across. Thunderbird calls some APIs from Outlook to do the conversions and without it you can't convert anything.