MS Vista vs MS Office Suite

[whitetailfan]

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

[acords]

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.

[Habanero Smoker]

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

[NePaSmoKer]

My wife got a new laptop with vista, she started complaining hey wheres outlook. vista uses whats called windows mail.

nepas

[Habanero Smoker]

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.

[Oldman]

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.

[whitetailfan]

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."

[SKSmoker]

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>

[whitetailfan]

...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.

[Habanero Smoker]

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.

[West Coast Kansan]

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

[Oldman]

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!

[West Coast Kansan]

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  ???

[Gizmo]

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 

[IKnowWood]

http://www.apple.com/getamac/