Windows died

I was on ouou.com, watching some video when suddenly Windows faltered and crashed. I briefly saw a blue screen detailing some error and then Windows tried to reboot but couldn't find ntfs.sys. Whoops! It told me to try repairing the install from my original Windows CD. Now I know I have it around here somewhere, and it might be the best idea to just use it to repair Windows--after all I did pay a fair amount of money for it. But--I also had a Mandriva 2008 live CD lying around fairly close, and it's really impressed me with its performance on my laptop and its overall ease of use.

So I thought, what the hell, this is a sign, it's time to go back to Linux. And I did it. And ten minutes later, here I am with Mandriva installed and up and running. It looks and feels great, but I know it's not coming without a price. And so, here's a list of Windows software I'm really going to miss:

Microsoft Word. I was familiar with it, it did what I needed, and it was powerful so I could do a lot of other stuff with it, like easily writing VBA macros. Oh well.

EndNote. With EndNote and Microsoft Word working together, referencing became easy and powerful at the same time. I can only hope one day to create a perfect bibliography style file with BibTeX and use it with LaTeX.

EViews. Really going to miss this one, especially as I'm hoping to one day write a clone of it. Needed to familiarise myself with it more.

Firefox profile. I'd built it up over more than a year of browsing and storing passwords and bookmarks. Oh well. Will just have to build it up all over again.

Let's hope everything else goes great.