Any of you guys in the know on potential issues with Vista on older office programs?
Our PC went kaput, so I found a nice package under a grand with monitor. Its an acer aspire with AMD 4200 and 2Gb DDR. Of course now it comes pre-loaded with Vista.
Mrs Whitetail started the file transfer process and in installing Office 97 our Outlook does not work. Computer can't seem to find it, and/or, when I started messing with the Office Setup tool, it said I was missing a file at the end of the shortcut, and did I want to delete the shortcut.
Anyway I just fishing for whether or not it may be common, and if so is the solution a simple fix, or Office 2003 purchase?
Thanks
I spoke with a couple people trying to sell me computers about this. I have 03 though and that's really all I asked them about. I was told that 03 will work just fine. Just curious, did you do all the updates available for 97? I'm not sure it matters or not, but it's worth looking into.
I haven't upgraded yet, but you may want to go to this site to see about potential software problems.
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/community/default.mspx?wt_svl=20371a&mg_id=20371b
My wife got a new laptop with vista, she started complaining hey wheres outlook. vista uses whats called windows mail.
nepas
Just another thought. Since you already installed Vista, if you are going to upgrade your office suite, you may want to get Office 2007, because there is no guarantee that Outlook 2003 will be compatible with Vista either, or how much longer MS will support Office 2003. Also Office 2007 will take advantage of the features in the Vista OS.
If you do upgrade and you have a child who is attending school or college; or if you or your wife are attending classes or are in the educational field; you can purchase the student version. The student version is full featured, cost less, and you can install it on up to 3 machines. It will also have Outlook 2007. From what I'm hearing, there have been some major changes in Office 2007, so there will be some what of a learning curve.
Something to think about. With Vista most of your older programs and stuff like scanners are no longer supported or just flat out will not work. To get around this I have two bootable drives for one system. I run XP Pro on my business drive and yet I can run Vista on my personal drive. The best of both worlds. The extra cost for this is two $60.00 removable caddies, and one extra hard drive.
Quote from: Oldman on May 11, 2007, 05:16:49 AM
Something to think about. With Vista most of your older programs and stuff like scanners are no longer supported or just flat out will not work.
Yep Printer is Lexmark X73 3-in-1. Not supported.
Isn't that nice. I'd love to work in a service industry where you could just say "Ya, sorry about that but we decided that our latest greatest stuff will only work with mostly our own stuff and other peoples latest and greatest stuff. You're SOL and there is nothing you can or will do about it except go spend more money to get stuff that works."
That's like Bradley saying "With our new puck machine, we decided that we don't really care about all the people that bought OBS, they're pretty much useless, our new pucks will only fit the BDS or BPS."
Welcome to the IT industry. Vista is not ready for the world, but MS thought so. I refuse to roll out any 1st gen OS in my corporate environment. Just a note here, Outlook does not come standard with any operating system. Outlook is part of the Office suite and is a seperate product. Office you can buy the pieces seperatly if all you are lookign for is an e-mail client.
Vista has poor support right now for many things. If your product is not brand new and doesn't have vista drivers, you may or may not be able to find drivers for your product. It is something you have to accept. In the IT world, something that is 2 years old might as well be 100 because it is outdated. Working in this field for 11 years now, it is common place to upgrade your office packages every 2 years. WE replace our computers every 3, servers 2-3 and printers 3-5 depending on volume. Anytime you get something new, you have to spend 25-30 hours doing backend research to see what isn't going to work that used to and how to make it work.
Welcome to technology! Yay.. <barf>
...and if I had just upgraded 2 months ago, I would have gotten XP pre-loaded with no problems.
I used Win95 well into the 2000's until I needed 98 to run a program.
I will accept that people can design new programs that are not meant to run on an old OS so you have to upgrade the OS, but I can't accept a fresh OS that does not support older programs.
That's like not being able to read a document written on an older version of Word. If your old Word wont read a document written on newer Word then fine, but the newer version should always support the old documents. I apply this theory to programs and hardware.
Last year I had to get XP on my old machine because I bought a Magellan eXplorist and the Mapsend software would not accept Win98. I was upset, but bit the bullet because I was behind the times with my OS. But designing a new OS that will not run older programs or hardware is ridiculous.
You can't predict what will come, but you sure as heck can look back on what was.
I posted this link some time ago. For those that are running XP SP2, you can run the advisor and it will let you know what hardware and software that will not be compatible and possible solutions. Click on the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor link.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/upgradeadvisor.mspx?wt_svl=20406a&mg_id=20406b
WTF;
It may run under Vista, and you can check any further problems that you may encounter.
Mr. Gates has done a great job of creating the "new standard" machine. ;) Not that many years ago the blue screen of death was something horrible, occurances today are almost like a feature.
One thing for sure is the man can certainly spell good and i like the way he fixes the order of words so what i write is understandable :-X
Here is one for ya.... the new game Halo 2 will only run on Vista~~! (BTW Micro Dude is who made the game~~!) Now that is marketing as Halo 1 is very popular.... I can see it now.... BUT Dad I got to have Vista... all of my friends have moved on to Halo2!
Oldman, I dont know what you mean by two boot drives / caddies. Sounds like a solution to my nausa. :( I bought a real nice machine about 18 months ago and your approach may be a solution to "staying current" for a few more years. :-[
I see Gizmo next week he can probably explain it slow enough i get it ???
There is always one thing I remind myself when it comes to OS and computer upgrades, backward compatibility is not always a good thing. The processor capabilities have suffered for many years from backward compatibility. In simple terms, Microsoft has kept their software in the old x86 architecture compatibility for many years which kept the processor architecutre (addressing capabilities) from being as fast as it could. If Microsoft and other hardware manufacturers hadn't tried to keep that backward compatibility for so long, the speeds of today could have been realized many, many years ago and we could be faster today (IMHO). It would be nice to be able to have some kind of go between for the old stuff but rather than that and continuing the old and slow from preventing improvments, consumers should be given the choice, but they should also be informed of the issues with the choice.
I have a color laser printer that I have an old windows 2000 system still around to be able to print. They never made drivers for the printer after the W2K OS so XP, 2003, Vista, etc are not capable of printing with a manufacturer's driver. That was the problem with getting a super fantastic dollar saving deal on a color laser printer (under $1000 back in the days when color laser jets were $6000 to $8000). I think I got my monies worth out of it and will have to move on.... probably $600 now for a color laser jet much better, faster, etc. :D
http://www.apple.com/getamac/
Quote from: West Coast Kansan on May 12, 2007, 11:17:26 AM
Oldman, I dont know what you mean by two boot drives / caddies. Sounds like a solution to my nausa. :( I bought a real nice machine about 18 months ago and your approach may be a solution to "staying current" for a few more years. :-[
I see Gizmo next week he can probably explain it slow enough i get it ???
My hard drives are in removable caddies... they come out just like a 3 1/2" floppy. I really have three. The one on the bottom of the three is in a dead holder... it is not wired to the system...it holds the bootable drive that I'm not currently useing. The top holder is my boot drive holder. The second one down is a slave... mass storage drive.
XXXXX <----bootable drive holder.
XXXXX <----slave drive (mass storage) holder.
XXXXX <----just a holder for the boot drive I'm not currently using.
All drive holders have a locking on /off switch. I only turn on the slave when I wish to back up something. Lets say I'm on my business drive and I want to game. I turn off my system. Remove the business drive out of the bootable drive. Put in my gaming drive in the bootable drive holder. Place my business drive in the holder that is not wired to the system (bottom holder.) Turn the lock on the bootable drive and then turn on the power... Ping A Bang... it is like having two systems in one box. Plus the slave drive is one heck of a back up device for your data, and it is faster than any other type of back up medium.
Next, if you really have some very private important information, instead of taking a change that someone can access your information you just pull that drive out and lock it up in a safe....and if needed you can take it with you and put that drive into another computer.
Very 8) It seems to me I should do this as a true back up for this machine. Just create a mirror image and any HD failure is just that. I still have everything on a second drive until the first is changed. I have worried about that since it seems to be getting loud. ;) Wonderful if they are available is 200 gig sizes? Trip to Frys for mothers day I think. ;D
My drives by my gaming friends standard are somewhat small at 250 gigs... If you mod your computer to use the removable caddies MAKE SURE to get only aluminum drive and caddy holders... the steel and plastic units hold in to much heat.
About your back up drive being loud I cannot suggest enough that you pull it from your unit. Put in a new back up drive and then place your old backup in an external drive and move the date to the new backup drive. External drives are really cheap... mine cost me about 60 bucks... I will post images of my unit later so you can get a good idea of my system.
Edit: Living in a major storm state, I take comfort that all I have to do is pull my backup data (storage) drive out of my system and my SECOND backup data (storage) drive that in my external drive and no matter what I will have two copies of my business information. Either drive can be install into a new computer.
Ya this will add a couple of hundred of dollars to you overall,but at least you don't take a change or at least limit your chance of losing your important data....
Olds
Here are the images...
(http://www.susanminor.org/Rayeimages/computer/3-drives.jpg)
(http://www.susanminor.org/Rayeimages/computer/drive-holder.jpg)
I hope this helps with the understanding of what and how I protect my information. Normally the slave is not on unless I'm backing something up. I just turned it on so you could see it running--that is why the temp is 2 degrees C lower than the main drive. At the moment they both now read 29.1 C. BTW Seldom do I ever get on the net with my B-Drive. Only to check my B- E-mail, and that is to my own dedicated secured server.
Plus I also have that external hard drive for a second backup... the reason I go over-board is once upon a time I had a game hacker get to my system.
Olds, Thank you greatly. :) The pictures really helped, ;D Take Care
You are welcome... now to get back to the problem... with this system you can run XP and Vista... but on two different bootable drives. As I said the best of both worlds...
I was doing my annual spring maintenance, and while looking for the latest drivers and patches I can across this little nugget from MS. MS Virtual PC 2007 will allow you to run more then one OS on your machine, and you can switch back and forth with a click on the mouse. So if you have old programs that ran on Windows MS DOS, Window 95; 98 etc. you can install that OS on your machine with Vista or XP Pro, and run the old applications under the OS it was designed for. Virtual PC will run on Vista and XP Pro. Make sure you check out the Demo.
I've just down loaded it, and of course I will fully back up my drives before installing this program.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/overview.mspx?wt_svl=20323a&mg_id=20323b
Virtual PC did a decent Virtualization job for hosting multiple OS system for years. I used to use it a good bit, bit their processor translations was sub-optimal for my systems.
I have migrated to Parallels which is going much better, direct virtualization calls to the chipset is much faster. And also supports multiple OS instances, running simultaneous, I have a XP instance running now in virtual space that is clocking real solid to other systems at work. We are not yet allowed to install Vista, evantually I will get one going as well for testing, once allowed.
The good thing about Microsoft is there are 3 or more ways of doing everything. Lots of great choices to solve the problems. Olds, those Vantec drives look really nice. IKW's Virtual PC is a nice option for the occasional need to run a program in a different OS environment without dedicating a lot of hardware. We sometimes use VMWare to set up different environments for testing patches or simulating diffrent installs. I had a computer (Windows NT 4.0) that I set up with 2 different boot modes. The Windows NT 4.0 environment and a Windows 98 environment. I needed the Windows 98 OS to run a program that I had to program a Casio Databank Watch (used the monitor to flash the programing code to the watch). The NT 4.0 would not allow software to run that used direct calls to the hardware and therefore the software could not control the video card output to the monitor. For that type of application, I don't think the VMware or the Virtual PC would work which is why the other options (Multiboot or swapping hard drives) would still be the only 2 choices.
I had used the old version of MS Virtual PC when they first started giving it out for free, and it did not run smoothly on my machine. I'm hoping this version will run a lot faster and smoother. The demo appears that it should work a lot better.
Habs, loads of XP are working in about 30 seconds from started the saved memory stack in parallels and running real fast. it could be better I am sure but for my needs more than fast enough.