A one Window law office.

I had to break down and set up a Windows PC. I know, I know, the purists are now furious. Here's why. The Linux endeavor has to do with many things, affordability (ie: free) is one of them. The Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts distributes a free application that calculates child support. I handle a few Juvenile cases (ok, it's 40% of my pending files). So, every now and then I need the calculator. (There were some other programs too, like Lexis CD's included in some books that I purchased that just did not want to play nicely with Linux.) I tried to virtualize XP, but I had printing and memory issues. So, since I had a spare copy of XP and something of a spare PC, I loaded XP again.

I hated doing that to the PC. It was pretty happy with Ubuntu 9.04. It was amazing to me how much easier Linux is to load on a machine, once you get the hang of it. Interestingly, much of what I use on my Linux machines, I can use on the XP machine too. XP misses some things though, like the ease of turning ANY document into a .pdf and DVD codecs.

The nice thing is that I am not OS dependant (I would be happy to use a Mac in my practice too, but someone else will have to buy it. They're still just too expensive.) Linux is still my main, foundational OS, but unfortunately, its not enough to cover all my bases. Interestingly, neither is XP or Mac. Each has its place and I believe that if businesses, including law practices, want to survive in this economy, they will use the strengths of each platform in concert.