Bought a laptop from PC World the other day - wanted it there and then and the post is so slow these days. It's an Acer 5536. Nice enough machine - but gawd I hate Vista. 'Works' asked for the product key to be entered - but I don't seem to have that on any of the (minimal) paperwork. I built my own desktop so bought a copy of XP - and that of course came with the key.
You remind me to check on thinkpad t61 (intel graphics, balance of 3yr warranty)... unfortunately most on Ebay are also Vista meaning a copy of XP would be required also.
If the laptop has a gloss screen and you don't like it, 3M do anti- reflective films (not that they probably know, they seem to be getting ready to do an IBM-1990s along with most big western companies).
In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes
Don't you get the automatic Win7 upgrade ?
I'm hoping so. But they'll likely need the product code too?
In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes
Take it back immediately and replace it with a Vista Business machine that comes with XP "downgrade" installation software. This should get you a proper Vista with the vital bits eg a proper backup program in, and at the moment you should be covered for free upgrade to Win 7.
All this ought to ensure that you will be able to get drivers for whatever OS turns out to be least worst in future.
What on earth in these days of Open Office do you want Works for?
If you go for a vista business machine, then it comes with dowgrade rights to XP Professional. The Acer machines usually have the downgrade media included in the box as well.
One good thing you can say for it, is it is a cheap way of getting a full version of MS Word on a new machine. So if you must have word on a new machine (say for compatibility with other software that used office automation with word for producing printed matter), an OEM version of Works suite is about £28 trade and that comes with a full version of Word 2003, which is usually good enough.
If you have kids(*) you can get most variations of the MS Office suite from the educational resellers from about =A335.
(*) There are a few restrictions like they have to be in full time education and either yours or your grandchildren (there is something in the T&Cs about grandparent sbut not sure what it is).
Probably doesn't help TMH though as his kids are all growed up, but any G.Kids?
Compatibility of Open Office and Word is not an issue. You can set up Open Office to automatically open and convert any Word document and to automatically save all output in Word format. I know of one local council that does just that. They interact regularly with offices and companies that use only Word and nobody is aware that this council is saving the public a lot of money.
I've already spent more than I wanted to. Not worried about backup - it won't be used for anything important. But in any case I'll wait till I try Win7. If the worst comes to the worst I can always load in my copy of XP.
I do have Open Office - but was just curious.
I feel a fool. It's on a sticker on the back. ;-)
What you mean is no one's complianed that you are aware of, a bit different either that or they are lucky then or not doing anything other than plain text. B-)
I tried Open Office on Word Document produced by Word 2007 (I think, but not saved in the .docx just .doc) and it fupped up the formating summat rotten. Simple two page document with two columns a few images and a table. Open Office had the table in the wrong place formated with different column widths and text in some cells in a differnt style and could I change those and make it stick could I F...
yep. I have had no probs with teh average word document. There will always be someone who has used teh msot obscure feature of Word that they could find in the manual, that breaks everything except their particular version, but my experience is that communications from such individuals can safely be ignored.
The more usal issue with written documents, is that the person writing has used a particular font face, and spaces and carriage returns, to format (like a typewriter) and you dont have that font....;-)
Yes, there was a small issue, at the start, where the council's heading was not converting to Open Office. I found another type face (used by Open Office) which the council could change to. It was virtually identical but had a different name. Open Office is certainly opening all the correspondence they need to read.
"Dave Liquorice" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
You've not tried between different versions of Word itself, then?
'erself had a job application form a while back. DOC format, tables with protected fields. On her laptop, with Word 2k7, it was completely unintelligible and unusable. As soon as you tried to fill a field in, the pagination went ape-shit.
On OpenOffice, it wasn't quite _perfect_, but it was utterly usable.
A customer of ours uses Office 2000 still. They've recently had complaints from a customer of theirs that documents they send through still have some editing comments visible - but not in 2000. It's where somebody's added the comments in a more recent version of Word, but the older version doesn't show them...
All of this is why you should NEVER use .doc to interchange documents between organisations... PDF if the formatting's important, plain text if it's not.
Howard Neil gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
Fonts are provided by the OS, not the application.
ITYM most word documents, but not all word documents. Especially those where multiple users are making changes and those changes are being tracked. Unless OO is a lot better than it was. Even the latest doesn't support VBA or embedded media correctly or even some formatting and fonts.
think,
formating
Oh yes (lack of) complete backwards compatibilty between Word versions is a "marketing feature" IMHO.
All I'm saying is that telling people to switch to OO and you won't have any problems with Word documents is not very accurate. Those problems may well stem from MS but as a user that isn't overly relevant. OO either works as advertised (read/write/interchange Word docs)or it doesn't. In my experience it made a bigger mess than any experienced inter Word fup ups.
Or print it and mail/fax it. B-)
Ha, I think most people have forgotten what plain text is. The number of marketing emails I get that tell me my mailer can't display HTML and if I want to see their communication follow this link. FOAD, if they want to tell it's up to them to tell me a language I can understand. It's not difficult to generate plain text from HTML. If "the message" needs fancy fonts, colours, images then there is something wrong with "the message".
Yes and no. Many apps add to the fonts the OS has, not necessarily in a public way..
Fonts are often copyright, and buying an app gives you legal access to a load of new fonts.
Only WinDoze has one font directory, OS-X and Linux have many. Soem apps will use just the one..
' Course it is. A sticker on the front, where you could read it while typing it in, would be too sensible.
Owain
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