In my current state I think I need to warn everyone about a pogram called AbiWord. While they claim its a stable word substitute.... I have just lost an 8 page english essay I wrote all night. Its my final exam and due in 40 minutes and Ill fail the class because I considered the program a decent substitute for paying 120 bucks for word. Never, ever, will I use freeware programs. Ill never invest time in something involving one. There free for a reason, and this is just an example. Just a warning to everyone. Stear clear of Abiword.
I disagree with you on this. There are a lot of great freeware programs out there. In many cases freeware programs are often far superior in comparison to their commercial counterparts. I could name a dozen off the top of my head easily. I've used Abiword for a long time now. It is an excellent alternative to Microsoft Word in my opinion. If you lost your essay, chances are it was due to some error on your own part. Perhaps it is still on your drive and was saved in a different folder than you expected? We probably have the same version of Abiword, and I haven't experienced this problem, nor do I know of anyone else who has reported anything similar.
Aw, man that sucks.... but word can crash too though, didn't you save regularly while you were writing? Saving regularly & making backups is easy to forget when you're on a roll, but it is sooooooo important no matter what software or hardware you're using... back at college I was in a computerized accounting class and we had these $1 floppy discs (5 1/4 inch still). Everyone but me & one other girl saved themselves a buck by purchasing just one and not making backups... until just about a week before the end of term, when one classmate's disc screwed up. She had to re-type everything, not just that day's work but the whole semester. The next day, just about everyone had decided to invest that $1 for an extra floppy disc
So just because a free program happens to have the same downfall as a program that costs $120, you'll never ever use a free program again? HAH. Good luck. But seriously, instead of bashing freeware, you should've been smarter and used OpenOffice.Org. That program IS all its cracked up to be (as *most* free programs are; you just have to do a little bit of research to confirm it). (Either way, I've never had a problem with AbiWord crashing -- it was probably your operating system. Windows is a piece of shit too.) Speaking of that ... to the OP: Anytime you are using ANY program where critical data can be lost, it's your own dumb fault if you don't save your progress regularly. If a program crashes ... that's not your fault. If you lose your data because you didn't save it ... that IS your fault. Don't blame freeware when you could have avoided losing the data.
I think its the mindset - if windows crashes/loses a file/generally screws up, then "that's life" or "computers suck". But if software by anyone else does the same, you blame that particular company. That's what the Microsoft FUD scheme was designed to do. Whenever I really hate linux i try to do something in windows - and then realise that the grass always looks greener on the other side of the dual boot partition.
I mean I have used freeware programs for so long, and I look back at my post and I think the reason I was so damn pissed was because of losing this paper. I mean I failed my English course because of what happened and I was so god damn pissed off. I think its very little to do with abiword, (considering Ibe been using it for 6 months without problems) and more due to the fact of what me losing the paper resulted in. What im trying to say is that It was ridiculous of me to bash freeware as a whole just because I had one problem with it. One time. Its like that saying. Headlines are always front page and huge. But an error is usually in fine print and in the back of a paper. Damn this stress and college bullshit. (@ matt, I would love to use bittorent or direct connect, but my boarding school blocks every port thats not specifically needed by the it people.)
well, when writing papers, you can't get an error while handwriting it... but that does suck that it crashed...
For A Free Open Source Software alternative to M$ Office try: open office. http://www.openoffice.org/ Just released verion 2.0.
I consider my Linux computer with Open Office to be far more reliable than my XP machine, and I never lost any data on it. I have, however, lost several files with MS Word. Still, I'm curious as to how you lost the file, exactly. Did you just forget to save and then it crashed?
It was very wierd. I saved the file as doc extension so I could open it in other word programs. And after I woke up, around three hours later, the only file under that name was about half the paper WHICH is about how much I had before I converted it to doc. Hope that makes sense. As far as checking another directory or name, I did all that. Trust me I spent an hour looking for this specific doc file. Who knows...
Right click on the doc hit properties and look at the creation date and time. Go to start/search/all files and folders. Don't type in a name for the file, leave it blank. Go to "when was it modified". Check "specify dates", then "created date" from the drop down. Put in the same date for both the "from" and "to" boxes, and hit "search". A lot of files, I mean really a lot of files will come up. Wait for it to finish. In the top bar above the columns, on the right side of the window, you'll see date modified. Click on that and it will re-sort all the files in order by time. Then go through till you find the one you know about, and look around in that time frame to see if something sounds familiar. If you find it right click it and hit open containing folder. The doc will be highlighted. When I do that, lose a file or wonder where it's gone. I've found this a lot more efficient than scrounging around through a bunch of different folders, only to find it somehow got saved in the windows prefetch folder, or some folder I've never heard of. Then I have to try and figure how the hell I saved it to there. <g> If nothing else, you'll be amazed how much crap you can create in a day without even trying. Good luck. Edit; When you are saving a doc, you can force it to change the format when you name it. Like if it's a windows word processor file and you want to change it to a .doc file but it doesn't give you that option in the drop down, add the .doc to the end of the name, then enclose the whole thing in quotation marks. Like this "papertitle.doc"
