Take Notes with EverNote

EverNote is a free application for Windows that lets you create and organize notes. You can enter your own text, copy content from web pages or drag and drop it. For each note, you can assign categories. There are also automatic categories that let you find notes that contain images or notes from an application like Outlook. You can search your notes instantly and access previous versions of a note.

Notes can only be printed or sent by email, as there isn't a way to directly export them to PDF. You can drag and drop notes between EverNote and other applications such as an IM client.

My favorite feature is templates: you have built-in layouts for shopping lists, to-do lists, source code and more.

There's also a paid version with more advanced features like: synchronization with USB drives, search in handwritten notes.

All in all, an elegant application that looks like Windows Media Player (but it has more to offer) and beats the web-based Google Notebook, that is optimized only for web clips.