I am still missing the point. Never mind!
OK - it might be just me (although I do know that the French and the Irish were pretty close in the sixteenth century!) but let me break this down bit by bit.
First stanza - there's this bloke who threw away his computer -
I put an old pc with xp os on the tip following a plague of problems.
I neglected to take a copy of my note books that included a lot of work.
I replaced my pc with a refurbished desktop with Obuntu 11.4 os which is very differant from xp
Is there a clever way I can get my notes into Obuntu's version of a note book with out doing the work all over again?
Then there is a response to this -
Get the old one back from the tip?
To which our first bloke says -
It would be worth the effort if I could find it.
To which the final response is -
Okay well, it doesn't really matter which operating system you're using unfortunately. Unless you've clouded the data or backed it up to some other source it's gone to the same place as the tipped PC!
I seriously didn't think that data recovery could be expected to quite cover this!!