Since Redmond rejects the rest of the PC world and thinks they are the one only, there exist many freeware tools to learn your Windows system some sense of decency.
A few examples of the Micro$oft ignorance:
- openOffice works really well with Microsoft Office documents, the other way, no chance
- Linux can read files from your Windows partitions (also NTFS) with no problem, Windows does not even try to work with ext or reiserfs
For the second problem I found a good solution, the shareware tool Total Commander in connection with the freeware file system extension, called Ext2+Reiser plugin.
