Editor,
In Thursday's Daily Lobo article, "Students promote Microsoft for cash," Caleb Fort quotes Simone Mehta as saying, "The word 'free' makes some students instantly suspicious."
Well, there is usually a catch when it comes to Microsoft. Some might say Microsoft Works is an oxymoron. However, Microsoft has produced some nice software as well.
I'm a PC user, and I downloaded a trial of OneNote 2003 from Microsoft's Web site a few weeks ago. The program is useful and versatile for students and educators. It's great for organizing topics, papers, to-do lists, etc.
All my notes, papers, templates for transparencies and PowerPoint presentations can be arranged on one topic on one page - very accessible.
It was when I decided not to have OneNote that I soon had problems. After downloading the trial version of OneNote, it becomes a part of Microsoft Office. There is no uninstall feature for OneNote.
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Per their instructions, I had to manually uninstall OneNote from Add/Remove Programs via Control Panel. I then realized that, after uninstalling OneNote, my ability to check for Office updates had been crippled. Unchecked, this can lead to future security patches not being downloaded and allowing access for potential malicious software.
After pointing out this problem to Microsoft's help desk, my three-hour call became free of charge. The help desk was very professional. In the end, I had to clean out some registry files and reinstall Microsoft Office 2003.
However, my computer still acted a little funny, so this Thanksgiving I did a clean install of XP and wiped out my entire hard drive. I backed everything up, of course, before I reinstalled Windows. But it took me a good part of the day to do so and then download all the updates.
In my opinion, that's a lot to ask of people to try out a trial version of software. I decided to download a similar program, EverNote, which I'm still using. It does everything I did with OneNote, and the basic version is free, as well as updated versions, whereas the Pro version comes with a fee.
Jay Williams
UNM graduate student
