Oolite Bulletins

Cody wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2017 8:54 pm

the latest intel CPUs seem to require WinX

Really? I thought it was more the other way around, i.e. that new Intel processors won't work (or work well?) on Windows 10.

You could adopt my stance, which is: once Windows 10 becomes pretty much the only way to run Windows, that's the time at which one bites the bullet and switches to Linux, or at least starts to dual-boot.

I'll tell you something else that drives me nutts - if I may vent a bit. It's the appalling fragility of Microsoft Office. Office is the app that keeps many people on Windows, but it breaks if one does little more than look at it funny. And its 'repair' option tends to worsen problems. Millions of people use that program. Why can't Microsoft make it more robust? A common problem it has, with its installs and repairs and maybe just operation, is problematic registry keys. Now, if I get the right software, I can track those keys down and delete them. The installer (or whatever) knows the keys; why can't it delete or overwrite them? At the very g*d*mn least, why can't it give more informative error messages (for most of the time the messages are useless)?

I've just got one of those error messages, why trying to repair Office. The message reads: 'Something went wrong'. An error code is given, but it's only a code, and it's not even cut and pastable.

[Edited]

<chortles> They're probably trying to drive you into Office 365 - it's all happening in the cloud, man!
I threw Office out a few years back - all I use now is a basic standalone word processor.

After enduring all this brokenness, together with patronising and ambiguous messages that say all is great - just before another crash - the chance of my install 365 is zero. (Or rather, of installing it again: I did try it once, long ago.)

I need a fully-featured word processor. I can't find one that works well, and the least bad - when it actually works - is Word.

The 'repair' of Office utterly borked it. As previously. So I am restoring from a disc image.

Mistakenly, I aborted that restore, the first time, because the restoring software uses Microsoft's Pre-installation Environment thing which gives the same boot-up splash screen as normal Windows - so I thought my PC had failed to boot from the USB drive and was hanging. (Hanging, because the Pre-installation environment takes a while to load.) Why did Microsoft give their recovery environment the same splash screen as normal Windows?

I write this from my lovely Linux computer.

[Edited]

i use open office but by default it saves as .ODT..... when submitting documents online they reject this extension.

by services i meant to go in and disable all the stuff you do not need for example secondary logon... all the XBox stuff... too many to think about... oh yes all the remote desktop stuff. disable or at the least make it manual start.

spud42,

Privacy and de-bloating are, somewhat, different topics. But I do myself care about both!

Still using Office 2003 - it works, I know it pretty well, and I have the full install disk, not "bundled with the computer" crapware.

There's much I like about Office 2003, and I still run it, on Linux, under Wine. However, it doesn't have perfect compatibility with .docx (even with a plugin that allows it to read .docx) and getting it to output PDF, especially when running on Wine, is a pain.

Given that I could use another copy of a more recent version of Office, and given that my 2013 edition is so fragile, I've come to think that I may have to bit the bullet and buy a 365 license -- and install one on my Windows machine - presuming it will actually install - and another on Linux on a VM. (I can't run Office 2013 under Wine - well, 'Crossover' - because my Linux laptop doesn't have the requisite graphics.)

I hate the fact that as well as the technical problems - whereby Office doesn't work, even sometimes on Windows - there are the licensing problems: even if I got get either of my two versions of Office to work properly, I can't use either on more than one machine, because of licensing.

I used Office 2000 (from disk) happily for many years, mainly for Word, which was a very good WP.
The next Office I had (2012/13?), ribbons had snaked their way in, and the end was nigh.

Cody wrote: ↑Thu Oct 19, 2017 11:55 pm

The next Office I had (2012/13?), ribbons had snaked their way in, and the end was nigh.

There are plugins, at least one of them free and good, that circumvent the ribbon. (The Ribbon(tm): Enabling Things To Never Be In The Same, Findable Place, since 2000-ish.) I use one.

If Office 2000 has decent PDF facilities, and can read .docx, and - perhaps a bit ask - I can buy a copy, I might get one and run it either on Windows (if my 2013 installation breaks too much) or on Linux.

Another thing I didn't much like was the .docx format - all my docs have since been reverted to .doc format.
For the 2012/13 Word, I got a free plug-in from MS that produced PDFs nicely.

.doc is more portable that .docx, though a bit larger. Perhaps I should revert to using .doc.

What's that PDF plug-in called, please?

EDIT: I've patchy Internet at the moment, and I find that that - I presume that's the cause - makes Word 2003 slow to open, and to do some things, on Linux under Wine. I find that surprising and a bit disheartening. Perhaps there's some option I can toggle.

A quick search gives this, though whether there are newer/older versions available, I know not.

Ah, that's good. Thanks. Now if I can find a copy of Office (or even just Word) 2010 or 2007, that'll be grand. (That plugin won't work for my existing 2003 version. As I mean to have indicated above, there are third-party utilities that allow one to do it with 2003, but I had trouble getting them working under my WIne installation.)