[Dave Plowman (News)]

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.

--
*I got a sweater for Christmas. I really wanted a screamer or a moaner*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[js.b1]

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).

[geoff]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)"
writes
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.

Don't you get the automatic Win7 upgrade ?


'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.


--
geoff

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article ,
geoff wrote:
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.

Don't you get the automatic Win7 upgrade ?

I'm hoping so. But they'll likely need the product code too?

--
*If tennis elbow is painful, imagine suffering with tennis balls *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[Bill[_18_]]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)"
writes
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.

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?
--
Bill

[Dave Liquorice[_2_]]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:29:34 +0100, John Rumm wrote:

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.

If you have kids(*) you can get most variations of the MS Office
suite from the educational resellers from about £35.

(*) 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?

--
Cheers
Dave.

[Howard Neil]

John Rumm wrote:
Bill wrote:

What on earth in these days of Open Office do you want Works for?

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.


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.

--
Howard Neil

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article ,
Bill wrote:
In message , "Dave Plowman (News)"
writes
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.

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.

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.

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?

I do have Open Office - but was just curious.

--
*Cover me. I'm changing lanes.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article ,
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
'Works' asked for the product key to be entered - but I don't seem to
have that on any of the (minimal) paperwork.

I feel a fool. It's on a sticker on the back. ;-)

--
*Real men don't waste their hormones growing hair

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[Dave Liquorice[_2_]]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:41:56 +0100, Howard Neil wrote:

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.

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...

--
Cheers
Dave.

[The Natural Philosopher[_2_]]

Howard Neil wrote:

John Rumm wrote:
Bill wrote:

What on earth in these days of Open Office do you want Works for?

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.


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.

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....;-)

[Howard Neil]

The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Howard Neil wrote:

John Rumm wrote:
Bill wrote:

What on earth in these days of Open Office do you want Works for?

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.


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.

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.


--
Howard Neil

[Adrian]

"Dave Liquorice" gurgled happily,
sounding much like they were saying:

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...

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-****.

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.

[Adrian]

Howard Neil gurgled happily, sounding much
like they were saying:

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.

Fonts are provided by the OS, not the application.

[dennis@home]

"Howard Neil" wrote in message
...

John Rumm wrote:
Bill wrote:

What on earth in these days of Open Office do you want Works for?

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.


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.

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.

[Dave Liquorice[_2_]]

On 16 Oct 2009 08:53:43 GMT, Adrian wrote:

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.

You've not tried between different versions of Word itself, then?

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.

All of this is why you should NEVER use .doc to interchange documents
between organisations... PDF if the formatting's important,

Or print it and mail/fax it. B-)

plain text if it's not.

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".

--
Cheers
Dave.

[The Natural Philosopher[_2_]]

Adrian wrote:
Howard Neil gurgled happily, sounding much
like they were saying:

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.

Fonts are provided by the OS, not the application.

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..

[Bill Wright]

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
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 . . .

Well, you *do* have a bit of a problem . . .

I find that Word misbehaves most appallingly after about 2am.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Soem apps will use just the one..

******* keyboard!

Bill

[Adrian]

Owain gurgled happily, sounding much like
they were saying:

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 send stuff to my local council in Open Doc format. They can't read it
in Word, so I send them a PDF as well, which they can print out and then
retype into Word.

Nobody is aware that this council is wasting a lot of public money.

And all because their IT people can't be bothered to google briefly -
http://www.windowsreference.com/ms-o...-odt-files-in-
microsoft-word-20072003/

Of course, there's no reason why they couldn't just cut'n'paste any text
they needed from your PDF...

[blackbat]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:48:59 +0100, "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:

In article ,
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
'Works' asked for the product key to be entered - but I don't seem to
have that on any of the (minimal) paperwork.

I feel a fool. It's on a sticker on the back. ;-)

Works is horrible unless it comes with a full blown copy of Word -
albeit normally an older version.
Have you considered Open Office?
http://www.openoffice.org/
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/softw...4/openoffice-3

Similar to a complete Office suite but open source and therefore
completely free. I use it on a couple of my Linux machines and it does
the job.
--

blackbat /\x/\

[Mark[_30_]]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:16:28 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Howard Neil wrote:

John Rumm wrote:
Bill wrote:

What on earth in these days of Open Office do you want Works for?

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.


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.

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....;-)

I hate this. If you ask them about it then look at you blankly like
they think this is the only way to do. I have given up trying to
educate them. There are too many. It's a real pain having to re-edit
the documents to make them readable.
--
(\__/) M.
(='.'=) Due to the amount of spam posted via googlegroups and
(")_(") their inaction to the problem. I am blocking most articles
posted from there. If you wish your postings to be seen by
everyone you will need use a different method of posting.
[Reply-to address valid until it is spammed.]

[Mark[_30_]]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:18:02 +0100 (BST), "Dave Liquorice"
wrote:

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".

100% correct ;-)
--
(\__/) M.
(='.'=) Due to the amount of spam posted via googlegroups and
(")_(") their inaction to the problem. I am blocking most articles
posted from there. If you wish your postings to be seen by
everyone you will need use a different method of posting.
[Reply-to address valid until it is spammed.]

[Stuart Noble]

Owain wrote:
On 16 Oct, 08:48, "Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:
I feel a fool. It's on a sticker on the back. ;-)

' Course it is. A sticker on the front, where you could read it while
typing it in, would be too sensible.

Owain


Just don't drop the thing in the process :-) Laptops seem to be
accidents waiting to happen

[Bruce[_8_]]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:18:02 +0100 (BST), "Dave Liquorice"
wrote:
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.


My experience also. Documents in Word 95 & 97 work perfectly in OO,
and I have only had one problem with Word 2003, but the .docx format
in Word 2007 causes severe problems, as does .xlsx in Excel. No doubt
Microsoft made it so, but as you say, it doesn't matter who is to
blame, it just doesn't work.

There is also the disappointing news that Sun, under whose wing
OpenOffice was developed, has curtailed development of OpenOffice by
mostly disbanding the StarOffice team. StarOffice is Sun's paid-for
version of OpenOffice, the two packages benefitting from each other's
development, most of it being done for free because of the way the
OpenOffice Foundation was set up. But StarOffice apparently isn't
selling enough copies to pay for the team that supports it - not
surprising when people can get OpenOffice for free. So development of
the two packages will have, or has already come almost to a stop.

To be fair to Microsoft - and believe me, that doesn't come easy! -
they have reduced the retail price of MS Office so it is now truly
affordable, at least in the base versions.

I still use OpenOffice but every now and again I have to exchange
files with someone who uses MS Office 2007, and getting them to save
their files in Word 97 or 2003 format so I can read and edit them
without problems is becoming very tiresome. I don't think it will be
too long before I take advantage of MS Office's current low prices.

[Adrian]

Bruce gurgled happily, sounding much like they
were saying:

To be fair to Microsoft - and believe me, that doesn't come easy! - they
have reduced the retail price of MS Office so it is now truly
affordable, at least in the base versions.

For home users, perhaps.

For business use, though, it is still expensive - Office 2007 Standard
edition, retail, is c.£250+vat per licence.

[george (dicegeorge)]

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
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.

Open Office is good, it can save in PDF,
also you could save in RTF
but saving as HTMNL webpage whould be the most portable.

http://www.openoffice.org/

With a new laptop I'd wait 13 days then download and install
the new version of Ubuntu as a dual boot,
use ubuntu for 99% of everything,
the graphics are promised to be speedier than before.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

[g]

[Adrian]

Owain gurgled happily, sounding much like
they were saying:

Of course, there's no reason why they couldn't just cut'n'paste any
text they needed from your PDF...

PDF text layout is far from perfect.

If the layout is that important, then Word is the wrong tool anyway.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article
,
Owain wrote:
I feel a fool. It's on a sticker on the back. ;-)

' Course it is. A sticker on the front, where you could read it while
typing it in, would be too sensible.

I spoke to soon. It won't accept it.

I then decided to register for the Win7 free update. Wouldn't accept the
machine serial number. Turned out I'd read an 0 as an O. On a sequence
that went like this:-

ABCDE0G12345678ABC12345 - the 0 being the offending character with no 0 in
the number to compare it with. So I read it as a O.

Then the website wouldn't recognise my postcode. Said it was incorrect. So
stored my address without it.

I've seen better websites written by a 5 year old. ;-)

--
*White with a hint of M42*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article ,
blackbat wrote:
On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:48:59 +0100, "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:

In article ,
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
'Works' asked for the product key to be entered - but I don't seem to
have that on any of the (minimal) paperwork.

I feel a fool. It's on a sticker on the back. ;-)

Works is horrible unless it comes with a full blown copy of Word -
albeit normally an older version.
Have you considered Open Office?
http://www.openoffice.org/
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/softw...4/openoffice-3

Similar to a complete Office suite but open source and therefore
completely free. I use it on a couple of my Linux machines and it does
the job.

I'll not use it much if at all. I use Publisher Plus on my Acorn for any
documents I need. If I have to send anything electronically I do it using
an open file standard. Like PDF.

--
*Seen it all, done it all, can't remember most of it*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

In article ,
Stuart Noble wrote:
Owain wrote:
On 16 Oct, 08:48, "Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:
I feel a fool. It's on a sticker on the back. ;-)

' Course it is. A sticker on the front, where you could read it while
typing it in, would be too sensible.

Owain


Just don't drop the thing in the process :-) Laptops seem to be
accidents waiting to happen

Indeed - and I bought it expressly for setting up the ECU in the car. It
says Win 95 onwards will work but the old laptop I got first running '98SE
couldn't cope.

Why don't laptops have a proper carrying handle?

--
*Where there's a will, I want to be in it.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

[Bambleweeny57]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:13:51 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

Works is horrible unless it comes with a full blown copy of Word -
albeit normally an older version.
Have you considered Open Office?
http://www.openoffice.org/
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/softw...4/openoffice-3

Similar to a complete Office suite but open source and therefore
completely free. I use it on a couple of my Linux machines and it does
the job.

I'll not use it much if at all. I use Publisher Plus on my Acorn for any
documents I need. If I have to send anything electronically I do it
using an open file standard. Like PDF.

FWIW Open Office uses ISO26300 for its WP files, a format that can be
read & written by a number of other word processors (Abiword, Lotus
Symphony, MS Office, Softmaker, WordPerfect...).

Ironically MS Office 2k7 SP2 offers support for ISO26300... MS do not
even support their own XML based ISO standard in spite of the effort they
put into pushing through the approval process.

BW

[Jules[_2_]]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:16:07 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
Why don't laptops have a proper carrying handle?

ISTR having a Compaq laptop in the very early 90s that did, and I think a
few other vendors around that time did, too. I suppose it was one of the
first things to go to save bulk/weight, the theory being that people only
ever have the laptop on a desk (or lap) and carry it in a bag otherwise.

[Jules[_2_]]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:33:21 +0100, Bruce wrote:

Documents in Word 95 & 97 work perfectly in OO,
and I have only had one problem with Word 2003, but the .docx format
in Word 2007 causes severe problems

I think of the folk I know here, as an OO user I'm the only one who can
open docx format - people often email files in that format to me for
conversion, because their copies of Word won't even open it. OO at least
does it badly - but enough to pull the text out and save it into a more
useful format.

[Keith W]

"Jules" wrote in message
news
On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:33:21 +0100, Bruce wrote:

Documents in Word 95 & 97 work perfectly in OO,
and I have only had one problem with Word 2003, but the .docx format
in Word 2007 causes severe problems

I think of the folk I know here, as an OO user I'm the only one who can
open docx format - people often email files in that format to me for
conversion, because their copies of Word won't even open it. OO at least
does it badly - but enough to pull the text out and save it into a more
useful format.

They only need to download the free converter from MS and they can open the
docx files themselves in earlier versions of Word.
http://tinyurl.com/abbsvy
--
Keith W
Sunbury on Thames
(If you can't laugh at life, it ain't worth living)

[Dave Liquorice[_2_]]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:11:52 -0500, Jules wrote:

I think of the folk I know here, as an OO user I'm the only one who can
open docx format - people often email files in that format to me for
conversion, because their copies of Word won't even open it.

Point them at the free plugin from MS for older vesrions of Word that
enables them to open .docx format files. It's free and works, within
the limitations of backwards compatibilty from Word 2007 of course...

--
Cheers
Dave.

[Bill[_18_]]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)"
writes
In article ,
Bill wrote:
In message , "Dave Plowman (News)"
writes
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.

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.

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 still think that the question of drivers for XP might be worth
checking on.

I don't know about a 5536, but some Acers I've got or had needed
specific Acer bodged drivers to allow things like a volume control to
work properly.

That's the other thing about the decent MS backup program. It lets you
take a complete image to DVD's before you revert to XP and discover
something missing.
--
Bill

[Tim W[_2_]]

John Rumm
wibbled on Friday 16 October 2009 18:42


In reality they probably don't care too much - its all a process of
training the next generation to demand MS tools because that is what
they grew up with.

Mine think linux is cool.

Especially when I showed them this:

http://plf.zarb.org/logo5.jpg

Wonder what the school will say if I get them little T-shirts for the next
Mufti day...

--
Tim Watts

This space intentionally left blank...

[[email protected]]

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:
In article
,
Owain wrote:
I feel a fool. It's on a sticker on the back. ;-)

' Course it is. A sticker on the front, where you could read it while
typing it in, would be too sensible.

I spoke to soon. It won't accept it.

Mr Soon here, I didn't quite catch what you said.

--
Chris Green

[Stuart Noble]

John Rumm wrote:
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

Why don't laptops have a proper carrying handle?

You can get them, but you won't like the price:

http://www.panasonic.com/business/To...bnotebooks.asp




I like the
"engineered to handle all the drops and bumps of daily business life"
bit.
Does that mean the hard drive survives a fall off your lap?