Ah, OneNote. It is one hell of an app. I used it few times and loved it – best note taking software out there IMHO. I decided not to use it though, because I couldn’t take it with me when was on a Linux machine.

When I was doing my masters I was trying to find a comparable open source alternative. No such luck. I don’t really need it as much these days. I don’t own a tablet, and don’t usually need to take notes on the computer anymore.

Outlook is easier. I actually managed to install Outlook 2003 under Ubuntu with just Wine. It was working fine for the time I was testing it. I think there were few glitches but it was usable. But yeah – I get it.

Most of my mail these days is done via webmail – gmail for personal stuff, Zimbra for work. A lot of people use the Zimbra Outlook Connector but I refused to and use web interface and/or the Zimbra Desktop feature. :P

Adobe suite is the killer here. Gimp and Inkskape are nice, but not as powerful IMHO.

I get it though. There are tough. I’m glad I’m not addicted to these apps. I instinctively avoid these proprietary vendor lock-in traps.

Here is what you can do though:

1. Download VirtualBox
2. Install Windows XP inside
3. Install Outlook, Photoshop, etc. insite
4. ???
5. Profit

This is what I do and when I do need to use MS Office or Photoshop, I boot up my virtual machine. :)

Than again it may be a bit tricky with the tablet.

@ Luke Maciak:

What software? At this point 90% of the stuff I use is multi-platform. For example, I use Firefox/Chrome to browse the web. Vim for text editing. TexMaker for LaTex. Komodo Edit for PHP/Python coding. Eclipse of Java. Thunderbird for POP/IMAP email. Pidgin for IM. Gimp when I can get away with not using Photoshop for image editing. Rest of the stuff is done on the web.

I am seriously addicted to Microsoft OneNote. I use it to keep all of my notes in and outline all my ideas for things. I can enter things in handwriting on my Tablet-PC or text. I can link between things relatively easily (although sometimes those links break on me). I have looked at some of the multi-platform apps and they don’t have the feature list I need. EverNote has some nice features but I will never entrust all of my notes to some cloud service that I have to pay for every month.

I am stuck on Microsoft Outlook as well. I like the way all the data is integrated with links between notes, contacts, appointments, and tasks. I like all the categories and the fact that I can build pretty darned sophisticated filters to show things like “Just the homework that I could start working on that is due in the next week.” Until my Palm Pilot died I was hooked on the fact that I could sync every bit of that over to my Palm and have it with me everywhere.

I like the Adobe CS4 suite. I know there are alternate products out there but I know I will eventually need to exchange files back and forth with professional artists and printers. I have yet to look at programs such as Gimp or InkScape and I plan to some day. But I have already invested time in learning the commercial apps and all the other people I know, who do graphics work, use the commercial apps so it is easier to get and share tips about how to use them.

As compatible as Open Office may be, Microsoft will always keep finding ways to make their software incompatible. Since I can’t force everyone I deal with to switch to Open Office, I have to be able to make sure my documents will open nicely in the application they use.

I know it is the Microsoft trap. I have been railing against it since there has been a Microsoft. But I can’t force the world to switch to beta-max just because it has better quality video. They are gonna use what they are gonna use because they are in the trap too. That said, I still think that some of the things Microsoft makes (like OneNote) are just a lot better than what I can get on any other platform.

But I don’t want to start yet another platform war. I use what I use because it works for me and I don’t want to invest too darn much time trying to switch just on principle. I will really switch when I can get ALL that I really need on some other platform.

Grant Robertson wrote:

So, basically, a well reasoned, but lucky guess. Isn’t it amazing how – after a few decades of beating our heads against these things – we can do that and generally get by OK? Though, I’m sure you backed everything up first, right? ;^)

Nope. Why would I? I only back stuff up on user laptops if I’m suspecting the drive will fail in a spectacular way. Fiddling with OS guts is not that scary. If anything breaks I can still boot it off the CD/USB and use Knoppix to back up the data and then reimage if that’s what it takes. :)

Grant Robertson wrote:

I do plan to install a dual boot of Ubuntu over the Christmas break. I know it will take me a long time to wean myself off of some of the software that I am used to using but I am going to try.

What software? At this point 90% of the stuff I use is multi-platform. For example, I use Firefox/Chrome to browse the web. Vim for text editing. TexMaker for LaTex. Komodo Edit for PHP/Python coding. Eclipse of Java. Thunderbird for POP/IMAP email. Pidgin for IM. Gimp when I can get away with not using Photoshop for image editing. Rest of the stuff is done on the web.

I seriously don’t think there is a single piece of software that I miss when I’m on Linux. Well, photoshop – but I use it rarely, and I’m not a big fan of i to begin with.

The only reason why my fastest machine at home is running Vista right now is video games. If I was not a gamer, wouldn’t even bother running windows.

@ Mart and @ Alex:

See, this is why I habitually uninstall every vendor specific piece of crapware from a new computer. Dell has gotten better about this over the years. Their Vostro and XPS lines seem to have surprisingly little of Dell branded crap preinstalled.

wow. i have a lenovo thinkpad tablet. it does all sorts of stuff that i hate. and on top of that vista. yeah. great investment. i just noticed, thanks to this i had a similar problem, although it was just begining. thanks.

Happened to me once. Used to have a Lenovo desktop as my workstation. I found that my 160GB HDD was left with only 20GB left. I only had one partition, C:, and checking the properties page for it shows that it only has 35GB of used space. I disabled shadow copy (was on Vista at the time) and removed all restore points. No dice.

Turns out, it was the Lenovo’s own utility software “Rescue And Recovery” that was eating up all the space. I uninstalled it, and presto, recovered about 100GB of space. Til now, I still had no idea where that application stored all those data.

hdrev wrote:

Another reason to use another OS.

The reason I still use Windows now is that I spent so many years supporting it. There was no money in supporting other OSes. They either didn’t mess up as much as Windows or they were used by people who already knew how to support themselves.
I do plan to install a dual boot of Ubuntu over the Christmas break. I know it will take me a long time to wean myself off of some of the software that I am used to using but I am going to try.

Another reason to use another OS.

Luke Maciak wrote:

As to how I recognized dupes?
Well, I ordered the files by size and noticed there were over 3k files of identical size, with similar randomly generated file names. This seemed highly irregular and suspicious. When I highlighted all these files their combined sized added up roughly to the missing 20GB. I removed almost all of these and didn’t touch anything else.

So, basically, a well reasoned, but lucky guess. Isn’t it amazing how – after a few decades of beating our heads against these things – we can do that and generally get by OK? Though, I’m sure you backed everything up first, right? ;^)

@ Grant Robertson:

In this case the files were directly in the Installer folder. The sub directories were fine. As to how I recognized dupes?

Well, I ordered the files by size and noticed there were over 3k files of identical size, with similar randomly generated file names. This seemed highly irregular and suspicious. When I highlighted all these files their combined sized added up roughly to the missing 20GB. I removed almost all of these and didn’t touch anything else.

I think there is some sort of a cleanup tool that can do this automatically but it doesn’t always work. I don’t know it’s name of the top of my head.

@ Dan:

Thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely check it out. :)

@ road:

Actually you have to check the “Show System Files” box that’s few items below the “Show Hidden Files” box. Once you do that it shows up just fine.

this happened to me pretty recently. what’s weird is it’s not just any old hidden folder. even with ‘hidden folders’ view-able I still can’t see it, but if you explicitly type ‘c:\windows\installer’ into the location bar *poof* there it is… weird.