Category: software

Changes

I decided to make a couple of major software changes on my home computer tonight.

First, I switched from using Eudora 4.3 for my e-mail over to Outlook 2003. I’ve been using Eudora for nearly 10 years now, but I haven’t bought an upgrade in a few years. The old version was starting to flake out a bit, but I really didn’t want to pay $40 for the new version when I had Outlook sitting on my hard drive doing nothing. I got all my messages from Eudora to Outlook by the recommended method of first importing them into Outlook Express, then importing from OE to Outlook 2003. That worked pretty well, and even saved my folder structure with no problems. The resulting .PST file is about 100 MB. My Eudora directory was about 90 MB, so it looks like there’s not as much bloat to Outlook as I thought there would be. I notice that Outlook seems a bit sluggish compared to Eudora, but maybe that’ll get better after I clean up the mail file a bit.

My second big change was pulling my music library into iTunes and letting that be my default music player. I, of course, use iTunes on my Mac, but I’ve been using something called Zinf on my PC. It works OK, but it’s not as nice as iTunes. I’ve had serious problems with iTunes in the past, but the current version seems to be stable on my machine. I’ve got about 10 GB of music on my PC, mostly downloaded from EMusic. I’ll probably still stick with Nero for CD burning, just because I can’t imagine iTunes could possible work better.

Microsoft Reader

I’m very frustrated with Microsoft Reader. I wanted to start reading The Subtle Knife, book two of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, today. My little Pocket PC would not cooperate. First, MS Reader would just give me errors. Uninstalling, reinstalling, reactivating — nothing worked. Eventually, the device wound up getting stuck in such a way that I could not reset it, no way, no how. I’ve got it going again, after flipping the “last-ditch” switch that wipes the memory completely, restoring it to factory defaults. I’ve got it working again, but really I shouldn’t have to spend more than an hour just trying to get to the point where I can read a book. Back to paper, dang it.

OneNote

I’m trying to figure out what the big deal is with Microsoft’s OneNote. When it was first previewed, about a year ago, Steve Gillmore went nuts over it, calling it “the new center of the Office universe”. Now, I’m willing to acknowledge that it is kinda cool, but really, it’s just a little application for note-taking. There have got to be a zillion similar applications out there. When I first saw it, I was reminded of Yeah Write, a low-end word processor released by some former WordPerfect employees a few years ago. The interface on OneNote is prettier, but actually quite similar to Yeah Write in some ways. I could see OneNote as a nice freebie program for Tablet PC users, or just as a nice little thing to toss into Office, but a stand-alone app priced at $200? Weird. I have a copy of it at the office, from my MSDN subscription, so I may try using it a bit and see if something amazing happens.