I'm tired of Finale....always crashing and buggy as heck! I need something for my laptop that easily creates notation on the fly without the need of a midi device. I'm not too concerned about sound as I'm just trying to get some ideas from my head to the printer.

Thanks...

I've only used Finale in a music class for part of a term, but I never experienced any crashes. And I thought you could just drag notes to the staves? Certainly it's easier to input notes with a MIDI controller.

Back in the days before software like Finale I would use graphic design software in order to make a nice looking printout. Of course it's very tedious and time-consuming to hand-set all those notes, and you can't hear what it's supposed to sound like.

I also work with Finale, and although I have experienced some crashes, Finale seems to be one of the best programs for notation available.
I hope I'll get some time soon to look into Sibelius, which is similar to Finale, but I've heard only good remarks about it so far. However it's much too pricey just for getting some ideas down.
There are lots of cheap or maybe even free notation programs available, also "light" versions of Finale and Sibelius, but I doubt that you'll have as many possibilities with one of the cheaper programs as in Finale.
Maybe you should specify what "better" means for you concerning notation software.

Yeah, Sustudio, I really don't understand what the problem is either. Are you sure it isn't your computer?

Despite the constant heads-up everywhere about Finale having a steep learning curve, I didn't find that to be the case at all. Hell, Band-in-a-Box is much harder to get a handle on, if you go all out with it.

Oh, I forgot, I find Finale to have one of the best user manuals I've ever seen. It helped me A LOT over the last years.

Most composers I knew while in grad school preferred Sibelius, even though the school had Finale on its computers. I think you're going to find many pros using both Sibelius and Finale, but now that I think of it, the few "serious" composers (meaning, people who do it all the time for various purposes, on various genres; "pros" if you will...) I've met here also prefer Sibelius. I do not have Sibelius, I use an old copy of Finale 2003 all the time. I have no clue what Sibelius' advantages are, but I'm ALMOST sure they're both very good, comparably so. The whole crashing thing might be a computer-specific issue.

Next time I buy a computer (before the end of the year) I'm going to get Sibelius, b/c people I work with use that instead of Finale, and it'll makes file-sharing a lot easier if I just get it.

ive never had any problems with finale. it's been pretty reliable.

no complaints!

Crashes I've experienced with Finale are far and few between. When they do happen, they seem more related to my operating system than to the program itself. I've used Finale addictively since 2005 and am probably not going to change. I did run a trial version of Sibelius Five recently and discovered that it is probably more user-friendly to someone given a choice of the two programs with no prior knowledge of either. So you might try Sibelius. Personally, I'll continue to use Finale because it works for me.