Re: "for example Word 2003 will install and run ok on Win7, but will pop up the license acceptance agreement for the user to OK every time it runs"
It does not do that on my system.
John Rumm wrote:
Dunno what was wrong with WIN 2000 best prog microsoft ever wrote;))..
Second all that .. try it, you've nowt to loose:))...
Or use the latest version of Open Office;))...
What was wrong with W2000 (from MS's point of view) was that everybody already had it. That wasn't good for sales.
Let me put in a plug here for Jolicloud.
Barry Watzman :
You seem to be assuming that later versions are better. After several Quicken "upgrades" that made the product worse rather than better for my purposes, I stopped upgrading at Quicken 6 (1997, I believe). Nothing I've seen or read since suggests that I made the wrong decision.
tony sayer :
No *money* to lose. I'd place myself firmly in the geek category and once spent countless hours trying to get Ubuntu to do what I want a PC to do. Those wasted hours count as a loss to me.
In article , Mike Barnes scribeth thus
Well what couldn't you get it to do?..
tony sayer :
My log from that time (2006) is only available from backups and I can't be arsed to restore it so my memory will have to do. I remember that the Ubuntu equivalents to Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Quicken, Microsoft Office (particularly with regard to my macros), iTunes, and Turnpike (my mail/news client) were completely unsatisfactory. There were a few dozen further applications that I never got round to looking at before I gave up.
I don't think that there have been any significant changes to the situation since 2006. I've reluctantly abandoned Turnpike, Thunderbird is a barely tolerable substitute. Open Office is acceptable for word-processing and spreadsheets, but you would have to rewrite your macros. There still isn't any sensible Linux competitor for MS Access, which is all I need my Windows machine for now.
That's similar to my experience except the things I needed were Corel photopaint and Corel Draw.
And subsequently Rhino CAD.
The solution is to use VirtualBox for what windows I cant get away from
And learn to use what works well on teh native platform.
The GIMP is not bad as a photopaint replacement: The latest open office is fully compatible with MS office as far as my needs go.
I've never been turnpiked..so Thunderbird - or Icedove as its called in Debian - works well enough for me.
That's the beauty of virtual box - you can keep whatever you need from Windows, whilst migrating as much as is practicable onto faster stabler Linux.
AND if you are clever, and keep your data on the native linux and mount it as a shared drive in Windows, if windows gets borked, revert to last stable snapshot.
Personally its the best of all possible worlds.
YMMV
Or Publisher, at least not from the Open Office stable. Word can be kicked into doing some things but it's not quite a nice or as flexable as Publisher.
For what I need Scribus is fine although I also have Serif's Page Plus. It's not an OO product. It is available in Windows and Linux versions.
etc.
Many thanks for all the helpful replies so far. The general concensus seems to be that Vista is to be avoided like the plague, and that some features of newer laptops - desgined for Vista or Win 7 - may not work with XP. So buying a Win 7 or Vista machine and downgrading to XP may not be a smart thing to do.
So it looks like needing to bite the bullet, and go with Windows 7. The
32-bit version appears to be the safer bet.Which leaves all my legacy software . . Someone suggested using the Professional versions of Win 7 (expensive!) with the option of running XP inside it. Others have suggesated using Sun VirtualBox, and running XP in that. That should apparently run ok in the Home Premium version of Win 7 without explicitly requiring the processor to have virtualisation capabiliities. Have I got that right? I assume that I would need a lot of RAM and diskspace to be able to run a virtual machine. Presumably something with 4GB of RAM (the most supported by the 32-bit version) and 500GB of disk should do? I'm looking at something like:
Incidentally, just for a laugh, I decided to download MS's Windows 7 Compatibility Advisor and run it on my current 7-year-old XP laptop to see what it made of my peripheral devices and installed applications. However, I can't get it to tell me anything! It loads and starts running - with its little green bar scrolling across the screen - and displays words to the effect of "I may be gone some time". Then, after about 2 minutes, it abruptly closes - and that's that! No report. I've tried to run it several times - always with the same result. Anyone know what's happening?
It doesn't specify but I would expect that machine to come with the
64-bit version of Windows. It will be an OEM license so you won't get the 32-bit version as well.
Mmm - you could be right! I had assumed it if it was the 64-bit version it would say so (most do) - but perhaps not. I shall contact Acer to find out.
C'est microsoft, C'est tout!
If you feel that a given [old] OS meets your needs, fine, you can say that. I said it for a long time about Windows 98.
However, there is a STRONG (not universal, but strong) consensus that:
And I suspect that the number of people who accept 2. will grow over time, as the number of people who accepted 1. grew. I no longer use Windows 98. I did so for a LONG time after XP came out (years), but I no longer do, except on very old hardware on which there is no choice. And although, for hardware and software compatibility reasons, I am currently [still] using XP, I myself accept 2. as valid. And at some point I will stop using Windows XP.
Gib Bogle wrote:
yes, thats what windows users are tellin me too.
same here, except I run it inside a virtual machine, because Windows is still 15 years behind *nix in terms of general solidity and freedom from viruses and sheer configurability.
And even its font rendering is still crap. Compared with Linux or Macs. It just looks UGLY.
really with machine virtualisation, and RAM as cheap as it is, there is no need to 'choose an OS' - have em all.
If you want MAC OSX, of course you need a Mac, but then with MAC or Linux you can run windows inside a box, and with a mac, you can run linux inside a box, too. Though there isn't a deal of point to that. They are pretty equivalent really.
I cant think of any reason to run windows native on a machine, except possibly gaming.
If you want plug and play and ease of use, get a mac., If you want dirt cheap and superb performance tailored to your needs use Linux.
Leave windows for the few applications you need it for, and use the version that runs those: do everything else on a different OS.
Windows is for people who haven't a clue. Once you have a clue you will go for a Mac if you have money and don't like computers, and for Linux if you have no money, and do like computers.
Or FreeBSD if you are slightly weird.
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