To import your Google Calendars, just do the following: 1.) Open Live Calendar 2.) Click Subscribe 3.) Import the ICS file you exported from Gmail, like this: Advertisement Photos Not that many people use Picasa, so this one should be easy.

You dont even have to explainwere just here to help you crawl out from under the shadow of the big G, step by step.

Advertisement Googles Broken Promise: The End of Dont Be Evil In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally Read more The decision to close your Google account has to be carefully consideredafter all, this is the place that stores your email, your documents, your contacts, your photos, your news, and even your health records.

But this level of investment to one service is as good a reason to leave as it is to stay: If looking at your Google Dashboard, which lists all the services you use, and the amount and type of information you store on them, doesnt make you feel a little uneasy, then hell, what would Advertisement Anyway, were not here to make the case for you to drop Google altogetherits not something Im prepared to do, for a startIm just here to tell you how to do it.

Search Its easy to forget that there are other search engines in the world, because Google has been so plainly dominant over the last few years.

GO Media may get a commission HP Pavilion Laptop 15z Buy for 590 from HP The best alternative to Google, by a long shot, is Microsofts Bing.

Its an evolution of the Live search engine, and its offers a distinctly different experience than Google: its far from minimalist, with a colorful interface, content-tailored results pages, and and emphasis on reducing clicks, rather than reducing clutter.

Coming from Google it can be visually jarring, and the fact that the results for common searches are different if not better or worsemeans that at first, youll get the feeling that it isnt working right.

Advertisement Give it some time and some patience, and youll realize that its pretty damn good.

And even if search isnt perceived as the biggest threat to your privacy, its important to make the switch anywayafter all, it was Google search that was the gateway to all the other Google services, which youre now trying untangle yourself from.

Google Is Going Away Free Storage Space

Honorable Mentions: Yahoo Wolfram Alpha Collecta Mahalo Email Advertisement Back when it launched in 2005, Gmail lured users with insane amounts of free storage space: One gigabyte.

Impossible. This caught the dominant services of the day completely off guard, and made their free webmail seem utterly ancient.

Today, that one gigabyte has grown to nearly seven, and on the surface not much has changed about ol Gmail.

Meanwhile, the companies that were blindsided back in 2005 have had plenty of time to catch up to, and in some cases, exceed Googles offering.

Heres how to make the full switch: Backing up your Gmail: There are a number of ways to do this, but one stands out as the easiest: The email client method.

Once the account is set up, open Thunderbirds Account Settings panel, and navigate to the Synchronization and Storage tab.

Make sure Keep messages for this account on this computer and Synchronize all messages regardless of age are both selected.

Wait for your messages to sync to your computerthis could take hours, especially if youre near your Gmail storage limit.

What youve done here is imported all of your Gmail messages into a local clientThunderbirdwhich lets you browse them, search them, or back them up to an external hard drive for posterity.

And if you switch to another IMAP-based service, you can import these old messages into your new account simply by dragging them from your Gmail inbox folder in Thunderbird to your new accounts inbox folder.

Advertisement Contacts are a trickier question, but at the very least you can use Gmails contact exporting tool (under your Gmail inbox folder list) to create a CSV file or or VCard, for importing into a client like Thunderbird.

The best alternative service: As long as its been since Gmail showed up on the scene, the webmail scene hasnt seen many exciting new playersGoogle has a knack of preempting new competition when it moves into a product category.

So, for the best remaining alternative is a veritable oldie: Yahoo mail.

Google Is Going Away Free Text Messages

Consider the facts: Its still free It offers unlimited storage POP access is available in the free version, and with a little fiddling, so is IMAP access Free text messages in certain countries The interface doesnt look like it was designed in 1999, like certain other webmail clients.

Advertisement Calendar Advertisement Exporting your Google calendars: This ones easy.

Just: 1.) Navigate to your GCal settings page, and click on the Calendars tag.

Export calendars to an ICS file, like so: Advertisement 3.) Thats it The best alternative: Yahoo calendar is fine, but in the spirit of spreading your vital info around, lets go with Windows Live Calendar.

One youve created a Live IDyou pretty much need one of these nowadaysyoure automatically given a Live Calendar account.

Google For Mac Is Going Away