We had a fire and our home burned on 3/16/10 - at 7:00am. Since one needs to be available by phone and e-mail to the insurance people and all our office equipment burned our advance had to cover a new Dell 64 bit laptop and a bigger machine my husband built running 64-bit. We lost 3 Desktops, 2 Dell Laptops (one less than a year old), all our perfectly legal software, our pro-grade video camera, printers, etc, plus everybody's clothes! We were advanced $$ But it's never enough when you must rent unfurnished & buy new furniture. (Young people who still have older relatives, Moms and Dads who have things they want rid of are very lucky - they can start over with only a fewnew things. Our contents were well-insured contents, since we had all the equipment - but people, beware! Keep all your original copies of software (license and installation keys, etc in a FIREPROOF FILE CABINET). Many people with lots of computer equipment may supplement income witih doing video jobs (graduations, weddings, memorials for landmark birthdays - or setting up websites - it may not be enough to live on, but a bit of extra $ was nice. We didn't advertise, and my husband had let his business license lapse when we began raising the toddlers - he was too busy (me too). Since insurance companies depreciate everything as soon as you've walked out of the store with it, of course we've had our angry and worried moments - we HAD to replace at least 1 computer quickly, to stay in touch with insurance adjusters, legal issues, etc. Lke women use "retail therapy" , my husband countered his depression and worry by happily ordering components, and watching for the UPS guy & and spent too much building a new, K__k-A__ system, with multiple bells and whistles, a big USB port "splitter" allowing one to hook up everything to run raw camera data through and edit one the fly, and since that takes a lot of CPU and memory, he put in two terrabyte drives! (He was able to dry one out - really -!! since the water from the fire trucks did as much damage as the fire) and retrieved our backups, all the pix we'd put on the drive for the last several years - of the babies growing, etc. Due to a back injury, when I tripped and fell, carrying a 40-lb child, I was not a happy camper and worried about the house being underinsured, about spending the $ too fast, and the slow pace of the builder tackling the job. We had an upcoming court case over the grandchildren, since their mom (our daughter inlaw) sort of turned "gangsta" and got busted for cooking meth. Our son wasn't supposed to live with us to even help with his kids, since the state paid Foster Care money (which we needed badly). But, he ran out of places to go, and the morning of the fire, he was there - and there went my babies, back into state custody, a huge trauma for us and them, too.
All the information is probably extraneous, but I began to resent the money we'd had to spend on a system that ran only Office 2007, and since it is very different (seems you're on line with MS servers as much as you are working on your own private machine), I took an immediate dislike to Office 2007. In fact, I began immediately to HATE IT. I,ve had to do a lot of the donkey work for our lawyer, getting together information addresses, write a brief about the sitution, give him the lowdown on all major players with the state, etc, trying to find out things from them that they probably will be afraid to talk about on the stand. I advised him to subpoena their records, since he's not going to get anything out of them due to being "job scared" over this trumped up mess the state has made. I am by education a Registered Quality Engineer/Statistician, and worked for DuPont and type 80 wpm. Touch typists cannot go back to two fingered typing because of a keyboard that is made for a man's long fingers, the keys are large and flat, not concave, the "home keys" not marked with "bumps", etc. It was literally driving me crazy trying to get anything like work done at all. I didn't have time to UNLEARN Office XP, and that was a problem - UNLEARNING what I'd used at home and at work (or a system that used a proprietary hybrid with a WP program just like XP). I could work in XP in my sleep. So, when I complained that I couldn't type on my laptop, my husband bought me a wireless keyboard and mouse. Not a good fix, since there are few ways to arrange them all so that I'm comfortable and can treat the wireless as an extesion of the laptop. Finally, we did solve the ergonomic problem, since my husband bought a laptop bed-type desk which has a separate wooden 10x18" platform for the mousepad. The nicest thing about this table is that there are "strips" to hold the little rubber feet of the Laptop in place and another strip to rest the keyboard against, and all of it fits! But still, when he put XP back on this machine and my document suddenly had a Normal template with 3 languages (English, Latin and Thai)!! I've never seen such weirdness! The display of styles was waaaay out there, and the Laptop was hiding my documents once I'd filed them, and giving me previous versions (I could tell the difference - since I'd recalled the wording etc and I was crazy this morning. He learned from a MS HELP contact (whom he called to fix HIS machine) that he had to tweak XP, since it's designed to run on a 32-bit machine, when these new ones are 64-bit. A right click on the Word icon, a reset of compatibility, and we were supposed to be in business.
I recalled a forum - a real headbanger - online on the PC World magazine, about people being upset when the reinstalled their XP, hundreds of them complained that it never would run, locked up, etc. I knew from the forum that I needed to let Office download all the updates to the program (if they still support it). My husband refused to hear anything about bothering with loading with SP #1 and 2, but I told him about the round-robin of mud-slinging about reinstallations of XP. This was several years ago - when many home-users started buying new equipment (when it got cheaper and cheaper) and along with the new hardware, they got the pre-loaded software (maybe Vista, maybe Windows 7). Many of them didn't LIKE the new version of Office (probably 2007) and so were reinstalling their "perfect" XP software (they had legal copies - nothing wrong with it). So, XP was added back on their machines, and everybody was so eager to get going again, they forgot about letting the RAW program run without the several updates and Service Packs being added. When XP never ran well after the re-install, they were up in arms, looking for help, but nobody could tell what was wrong, since they didn't ask the right questions. They had recalled (some of them) that they needed to add Service Pack 3, but neglected any other updates and SP #1 and SP #2. Most of the writers complained that their OFFICE XP re-installs were nothing but headaches and they were perplexed! (perhaps they had new 64bit machines and didn't know how to fix the compatibility issue) It was not working like it should! The general consensus however, was that after reinstalling Office XP, was yes, they'd downloaded Service Pack 3. (My husband stubbornly also insists that SP 3 contains all the fixes from SP1 and SP2, installing SP #3 is the only SP one should install. But, the answer given by the IT guys at PC World was that even with #3 on board, if it wasn't preceeded by #1 and #2, that #3 would not work as it should.
So, I guess I am asking for any feedback from others out there who have done the same thing - and how did you make a success of it? Or did you move on to Office 2007 because you gave up? I had my machine just do the "automatic check for updates" it can do, to see the state of your product and what it lacked, and added each update it picked out. We didn't install SP1 and 2 because I think my husband was fed up with me and my whining. I will give it a chance, but I'd like to hear the experience of others - how did things go? What did you do to make XP work for you - reinstalls are not always the answer when you forget about the updates, etc. It is my belief that SP#3 was issued and built upon the first two Service Packs, and the PC World guys said you'd have to uninstall SP#3, put #1 and then #2 on your machine and then add SP #3. What's the verdict from users on this forum?
