A Microsoft Moment sans Office & Outlook

I was at a meeting over lunch yesterday when one of my Vaio laptops started acting-up; I'd turn it on, Windows (XP) would boot-up I'd login and after a minute or two the blue screen of death would flash and the laptop would reboot. This happened about 5-6 times - different boot options didn't seem to make a difference - I was having a "Microsoft Moment" (MM).

This seems to happen about once every 6 months that you have to take time off, drop what you're doing, and pay homage to the gods of software and fix the problem... Normally, a MM is enough to ruin your day - you don't know if your documents and email are safe (you think to yourself "am i ever going to see my email ever again?" or "my god - all that STUFF that I can't live without"). And of course, you could/should have backed-up the stuff but...

Luckily this time around, I am no longer using Office nor Outlook - I made the transition a couple of months ago and I haven't looked back. Also this time around, the stress was much lower: my stuff and majority of my documents are on gmail and Google docs respectively. Saved!

I remembered that this kind of crash had happened on this laptop about a year ago and the solution then was to reinstall from the factory CD and wipe everything out. So not only was my stress level much less but when it came down to doing a clean-install, the whole process took about 1/3 as long since there was so much less to copy off and copy back on (at last check, my Outlook file was about 10GB).

So! A Microsoft Moment made much less stressful and painful not having Outlook and Office to deal with. Next stop? Back to an Apple Powerbook not to deal with Windows at all.

Read more...

Google Docs... the way to go!

After I don't remember how many years of being a Microsoft Office junky, I just completed the final step of weaning myself away from the habit. A habit for which I paid a heavy cost every time I migrated laptops not to mention the retail price tag for Microsoft Office...

A few weeks ago, I started using the MS-Word equivalent functionality in Google Docs. I thought to myself "ok, this is cool". But I always knew that power point was the hook that would bring me back to Office. Today, I put together my first 3 page presentation using Google Docs and it was an amazingly positive experience. Sure, it doesn't have animations, but then again, in this age of frugality of ideas, maybe I don't need it.

So I am sold! My migration to Google Docs is complete. A few weeks ago, I migrated all my email (about 65,000), contacts (about 2,000)and calendar to Gmail. The migration was a bit painful because I wanted my archives to be moved as well. Just then, Gmail released IMAP support which made the migration work though labor intensive. It was important to me to maintain the original chronology of the emails, which some solutions that I found wouldn't have done (because they mass forward your old emails to Gmail). Also, I found Labels in Gmail to be very effective for keeping the original folders structure that I had for keeping email organized...

viola! I am OFF Microsoft Office Yo! When a friend recommended Gmail and Google Docs about 6 months, it was unimaginable then...

Read more...