Graham. wrote
Rod Speed wrote

It's not even that they have a product you pay extra for,
so it's not like, "We'll bundle this crap Wordpad, then
everyone will have to buy the latest Office suite".

They will keep improving Wordpad, its quite a bit better
than it used to be and many don't need Office anymore.

I'm not sure I would go that far.

I have a few forms etc on a memory stick in .rtf format so
I can be sure of being able to print them out on customers
machines that often have nothing better than Wordpad.

Sure, but many don't use Office for forms.

On Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:13:58 +0100, DavidM
wrote:

This is a bit OT but I know that there are people here with experience
of PCs and usually very helpful.

My old XP PC is starting to play up and I'm planning on replacing it
in the next few weeks. Currently looking at machines from the
Chillblast range as they seem to get consistently good reports. A
couple of areas where I'd appreciate and views and/or recommendations:

Version of W7.
Most of the systems I'm looking at come with Windows Home Premium, but
with a cost option to have Windows Professional. Win Prof has XP
compatibility, which I might/will need for some older programs I use
which aren't (and may never be) compatible with W7. There doesn't seem
to be any other advantage to me for Win Prof, but someone may think
differently?

Mail client.
I currently use Outlook Express, which isn't available on W7, so I
need an alternative. Outlook is a possible alternative but has many
features I'll never use (and will cost). Windows Live mail may do the
job but I played with early versions and wasn't impressed with it's
reliability - it may be ok now.

Mandatory requirements a support POP/SMTP and IMAP from multiple
email providers; allow two or more email accounts for different users
of PC with privacy; allow downloaded email to be left on the providers
server (where supported eg Hotmail), allow at least basic filtering to
direct incoming mail to different folder, support dlists or address
groups.

Desire able: allow import of old emails from OE (the wife and I have
quite a lot of emails that we need to retain and have access to; allow
import of addresses from OE address book.

Any advice gratefully received (but I'm not going the Unix route, so
please don't waste your time suggesting this option, though I know
that some prefer it!).
Thanks again for all the replies.

Had a quick look at Thunderbird and it seems to do the job quite well.
Will just have to teach the Mrs how to use it! Import from OE looks
good as well. I guess I need to install TB on the old XP machine to
import all the emails/folders, then copy the database over to the new
machine with TB (or do I need to export in some intermediate format
then import on the new machine?).

I'll probably go for W7 Professional, as I still need the XP
compatibility for a couple of other programs.

Any "gotchas" in XP Prof that I should be aware of, or is it all
fairly straightforward, bearing in mind I'm not upgrading an exisiting
XP system but buying a new system with W7 pre installed?

DavidM wrote:
I guess I need to install TB on the old XP machine to
import all the emails/folders, then copy the database over to the new
machine with TB (or do I need to export in some intermediate format
then import on the new machine?).

No. The format of the folder is the same.

Finding where it lives is less than trivial - certainly on Linux.

And is configurable as well.



--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.

On 08/06/2012 12:19, DavidM wrote:

Had a quick look at Thunderbird and it seems to do the job quite well.
Will just have to teach the Mrs how to use it! Import from OE looks
good as well. I guess I need to install TB on the old XP machine to
import all the emails/folders, then copy the database over to the new
machine with TB (or do I need to export in some intermediate format
then import on the new machine?).

Yup, that will work.

Install a fresh copy on the new machine. Then on the old one open a my
computer window, make sure the address bar is enabled, and type
%appdata% in to the address bar. That will take you to the hidden folder
that contains your various application's data.

look for the thunderbird folder, in which will be a profiles folder, in
which is a oddly named folder called nnnnnnnn.default (where the "nnn"s
will be random). Copy the entire content of that folder to a flash drive
(or share it on your network).

Now on the new machine, make sure thunderbird is not running. Now do the
same %appdata% trick to get to the right folder on Win7 (its different
from XP), and dump the content from the old machine into the similarly
named folder on the win7 machine.

I'll probably go for W7 Professional, as I still need the XP
compatibility for a couple of other programs.

Any "gotchas" in XP Prof that I should be aware of, or is it all
fairly straightforward, bearing in mind I'm not upgrading an exisiting
XP system but buying a new system with W7 pre installed?

Since you will be reinstalling your apps on the virtual machine, you may
find some which require activation (office etc) could whinge if you have
reinstalled them recently on the old machine - however that can usually
be worked around.


--
Cheers,

John.

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