Comment NoteTaker: electronic lab book (not free) (Score 1) 133
If you're willing to consider alternatives to freeware, I recommend taking a look at NoteTaker ($24.99). I've been using it for about five years and I find it meets my note keeping needs. NoteTaker's design is essentially a lab book, but being electronic, it permits a wider range of media in addition to text, including jpegs, pdfs, audio, and video. And of course it's searchable.
Each 'book' can be organized into sections and subsections, and there are tabs for easy access to each section. You enter notes as snippets ('entries') which can be one-liners or multiple lines with a figure, etc. You can customize fonts, colors, and some aspects of layout. Also, you can export books to PDF.
Aquaminds offers a free notebook reader (NoteShare), so you can share your notebooks without forcing others to pay for the software. And there's a 30-day free trial version.
I know I may get modded down for suggesting payware, but given the positive comments about lab books, I decided to throw it out there. And it's not expensive. I use NoteTaker to keep track of academic research projects and work I'm doing for clients (I'm a bio-statistician). I'm pretty satisfied with it, so I hope the company doesn't disappear any time soon! But if it does I can convert my existing notebooks to PDFs, which makes me feel less vulnerable.