My 5 year old machine lay dying in my home office. Struggling to keep up with relentless windows updates, new Internet explorer downloads, it finally failed. RIP dear old Compaq. Wish I could switch to all Apple, all the time. But, some endearing windows only programs, like Groove and Outlook keep me laden to the old MS ball and chain. Unable to port all my old endearing programs to newer MS operating systems was the least of my problems. Bought a fairly well powered Dell with 4Gig of memory and a beefy Intel Core 2 Quad with Vista. Hope to make the leap to Windows 7 less of a hassle than from XP.
So, now about Office 2007 Ultimate. I learned the hard way (so unlike the Mac world) that the following will mess you up if you try to upgrade:
* Make damned sure your new computer didn't come with trial versions of Office. That just plain hose your machine if you try to install when these are present. Trying to uninstall them proved very problematic. My machine became so unstable as to not let me uninstall anything, to become completely unresponsive, and ULTIMATELY caused me to completely wipe the OS and resinstall VISTA clean. And yes, now I have one of those windows.old directories on this nice new machine. I wonder if that is going to hose me on the upcoming Windows 7 upgrade?
* You will waste hours (even days) watching your Office 2007 Install progress bar progress to a point, then progress no more. That is, unless you turn off all your anti-virus software before the install begins. Throw a half dozen reboots of Vista in there for good measure as you try to get that old unsuccessful first attempt at installing Office repaired, before it finally takes.
* Now the pies-de-resistance, the freakin main reason I stayed in the windows world - to have Groove live on in its MS form. I held hope that converting my old and completely well behaved and completely functional Groove workspaces to the new Office Groove 2007 would be nirvana. After several problems due to the above mentioned restore, unsuccessful uninstall of Groove, etc., etc. ... my Groove workspaces are somehow corrupt and unusable in the new Office Groove 2007.
Why didn't I follow my instinct to abandon the time wasting world of MS?
I have spent the better parts of my free time over the past 2 months installing, uninstalling, rebooting, searching support, 50, 60, 70 hours or more, trying to get all my old functioning software up and in the new machine. All for naught.
My assessment of this product suite is that sure, the basics work: Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint. But they did fine in their old 2003 versions. Groove absolutely let me down and lost me several workspaces containing in many cases, the only versions of my work product and client deliverables from 9 years of consulting.
I just have nothing nice to say to MS.
Get more detail about Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 UPGRADE [DVD].
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