Category: Windows

Microsoft Office 2007

I just picked up an upgrade copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Professional from Costco. I also picked up a copy of the Home and Student version. That may seem kind of weird, but Office Professional doesn’t include OneNote, while the Home and Student version does. Costco doesn’t carry the standalone version of OneNote, and it didn’t seem like the H&S box would cost all that much more than OneNote anyway. Now that I’m looking into it a bit more, I see that Amazon has OneNote Home and Student 2007 for $54. I should probably look into returning the Office H&S version, or maybe selling it or giving it to someone at work.

The previous version of MS Office Pro allowed you to install it on both a desktop and laptop, and it looks like that’s OK with the new version too. You can pull up all of Microsoft’s license agreements here. The Office Pro agreement has this wording in it:

INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device. That device is the “licensed device.” A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate device.
a. Licensed Device. You may install and use one copy of the software on the licensed device.
b. Portable Device. You may install another copy on a portable device for use by the single primary user of the licensed device.

So that’s pretty straightforward. The H&S version is a little different:

You may install one copy of the software on three licensed devices in your household for use by people who reside there. The software is not licensed for use in any commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating business activities.

Kind of interesting. I really wish they would just include OneNote with the Professional version, though. That would have made things a bit easier.

On another topic, Microsoft has come up with the weirdest possible retail packaging for Office 2007. It comes in a hard plastic case that’s rounded at the upper right corner, and hinged at the lower right corner. The inner section basically pivots out on that hinge. The CDs are stuck on a hub on the outside of this inner section, and the manual is inside it. (The H&S version doesn’t come with a real manual, by the way, while the Pro version includes a “getting started” guide that’s a little under 200 pages.) The product key is printed on a sticker that’s affixed to the back side of the inner section. The end result of all this is that you’ve got a plastic box that you can’t collapse, nor can you easily toss it out without losing your product key. If you want to get rid of the box, you need to find a separate CD jewel case to keep the CDs in, and you need to either photocopy or carefully peel off the product key sticker. I guess Microsoft does this kind of thing to make the retail box stand out on the shelf, but it’s really just a big waste of plastic. Oh well.

I’m not sure if there are any good books out for Office 2007 yet. There’s a free e-book that you can download from Microsoft at their Office 2007 Learning Portal. It looks there are links to some other useful stuff at that page too.

Pocket PC – DST changes

After going through a lot of grief at work, making sure all our systems would deal with the DST change OK, it just occured to me to check and see if my old Toshiba Pocket PC would change on the appropriate date. It took a bit of searching, but I finally found this page, which would seem to indicate that the Pocket PC will take the settings from my desktop PC when I sync. If that’s correct, then cool. (You also have to manually switch to a different time zone, then back to your own, to force the device to load the new settings. Weird, but OK.)

In poking around, I also found that there’s a new version of ActiveSync (4.5) out. I installed it, and it seems to work OK. Not spectacularly different from the old version that I was using (3.5).

There’s some more info on the DST fix here and here.

new Vista laptop

I just ordered myself a new Dell Inspiron E1505. I got a pretty good deal on it through Dell’s EPP (employee purchase program) site. (I have access to that through work, since we do a lot of business with Dell.) I got it with Vista Ultimate installed. I still can’t say that I’m really enthusiastic about Vista, but I do think that I’ll need to learn it, just for the sake of keeping my skills current, if for no other reason.

I need to pick up a book on Vista too, either Brian Livingston’s Vista Secrets or David Pogue’s Missing Manual, I think. I probably still have Livingston’s original Windows Secrets, for Windows 3.1, floating around here somewhere; I remember that being a really good book. And I have a couple of Pogue’s Mac OS X Missing Manual books, and those are pretty good too.

I should try and get myself a copy of Office 2007 too, so I can learn that. I might pick up the upgrade package from CostCo, or wherever else I can find it discounted to a semi-reasonable level.

Really, Microsoft is just getting out of hand with pricing. They do have the “Home and Student” version of Office now, and that’s relatively affordable, but it doesn’t include Access or Outlook, so that’s a bit of a deal breaker for me, at least. And Vista pricing is a joke, if you’re buying it off the shelf.

Meanwhile, I’m still getting over my cold. I feel a lot better today, but I’m still feeling a bit weird. As long as I’m back to normal by WonderCon, I’m good.

Vista laptops

I’m thinking about picking up a new laptop with Vista on it. I’ve been been looking at some of the oddball ones like the Toshiba Portege R400 or the Asus W5Fe. Those suckers are expensive, though. It’s looking like the Toshiba A135-S4499 might be a good choice for me. It’s only $1500, and has pretty much everything I need, including two 120 GB hard drives. There’s a write-up on it in the NY Times today. I think it goes on sale February 20.

Windows Vista

Newegg has a nice page on Windows Vista. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to upgrade my home desktop PC to Vista or not. I think it meets the required specs, but I’m not sure how well it’ll work. If I can manage to supress my natural upgrading urge for a few months, that would probably be best. By April, there will probably be some decent new video cards that are definitely Vista compatible, and maybe they’ll even have stable drivers by then. I have a pretty decent AMD processor in my machine, but it’s not dual core, so that might be a problem. I really don’t want to go out and buy a new motherboard and processor any time soon. And I really don’t want to buy a completely new machine either.

maintenance

For some reason, installing my new keyboard today got me started looking at certain things on my PC and applying some upgrades. First, I upgraded the drivers for my video card, since I discovered that I’d been getting some weird messages in the event log related to my video card. Then, I remembered that I hadn’t gotten around to installing SP1 for Visual Studio 2005, so I went ahead and did that too. Both of those things are pretty big installs, so that killed about four hours, between downloading and installing. Maybe I should consider doing a year-end backup tomorrow, too.

goodbye Vista

I decided to give up on Vista for now. I restored the backup of my original XP install on my laptop. (Done with Acronis True Image, by the way.) I think if I had a much more powerful laptop, the Vista beta might be usable, but it’s just too slow on a 2-year-old Gateway machine, with 512 MB of RAM and a low-end video card.

I am still looking forward to the final release of Vista, but I doubt I’d upgrade either my desktop or laptop to Vista; I’ll need to wait until the next time I buy new machines.

User Access Control (UAC) in Vista

One of the most annoying things about Vista so far is the plethora of UAC prompts. I thought I’d try to figure out how to turn off the warnings on CA’s anti-virus software, since a couple of these come up every time I start the computer. Apparently, it’s all or nothing right now — there’s no way to turn off the prompts for individual programs. (See this thread for some discussion on that.) If I was using Vista on my normal home computer, I’d probably get about 10 or 20 of these, given all the programs that load on startup.

Windows Vista

I installed Windows Vista beta 2 on my laptop last night. I decided to try an upgrade install, which took quite a long while, and left me with a pretty slow and weird system. In particular, the wireless networking didn’t work at all right. (I hadn’t really expected much from that, but I thought I’d try it.)

I punted and did a clean install today, and that went a lot faster and has left me with a much more stable system. I had some inital problems with the wireless card recognizing my Airport Express base station, but it seems to be working now. (It’s an Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 3B Mini PCI.)

I also signed up for CA’s eTrust Anti-Virus free one-year trial subscription for Vista beta users. My usual AV software, F-Prot, probably doesn’t work in Vista.

Since I did a clean install, I don’t have any other software loaded yet. I may try the Office 2007 beta, or I may just stick with Office 2003. I’m not sure on that yet.

My laptop barely meets the requirements for Vista, so I’ve got none of the funky Aero Glass stuff going on; just the basic interface. It looks nice enough for now.

Assuming the system remains at least borderline usable, I’ll leave Vista on the machine and play around with it a bit over the next few weeks.