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New Vistas
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Well, I bought a new laptop. I bought it the painless way by going online to DELL. I got a beefy one with 4 Gigabytes of real memory, dual processors and a neat sound card. It has a big screen that is easy to read and comes in a nice case. Lots of people make the mistake of confusing disk space with real memory. It's good to always buy as much real memory as you can because operating systems are getting bigger. I got the machine up and running out of the box in a few minutes and the wireless hook-up was immediate. It is very robust and easy to use. It has a fingerprint analysis spot for security and a built in camera too Now comes the hard part. I have a big Windows XP Pro machine with lots of software on it. All this stuff needs to be loaded to Vista. Every person who is serious about computers builds up a list of software that they use every day over and above things like MS Word and Power Point. I have lots to load. My ancient MS Office (Office 97) loaded well.... great! I then tried FrontPage and it loaded perfectly. Next I tried an ancient version of Paint Shop Pro and it did not load.... oh oh time to upgrade. I got on Corel and loaded down on my old machine a Trial Version of the new Paint Shop Pro Pro X2 which worked fine so I decided to upgrade to the 21st Century, but to get the Vista version of course. It will also work with XP. Next I tried Publisher 2003. It would not load. I looked on the net and saw that sometimes you have to turn off virus protection to load Publisher 2003. I decided to again upgrade to Publisher 2007. |
(continued) So now where should I go to buy these two upgrades? Seems logical to go to Microsoft and Corel the makers of Publisher and Paint Shop Pro respectively. Not so fast! The web sites for Microsoft and Corel that allow you to buy these packages are seriously flawed. They are not easy to use. No problem, I go to my old standard www.amazon.com and they make it easy for me. They remember me and all the addresses that I've sent things to in the past. It's an easy buy cycle on their site. They even remember my name and what books I like to read. Anyway, I was able to order both packages easily and have them shipped in two days. I like to have the CDs in my hand and not just download from the net. They arrived on time and loaded perfectly. You have to fight the new Microsoft package over kill. You almost feel like chewing through the package. I loaded a 15 year old wonderful drafting package that I use all the time easily and also WSFTP the file transfer protocol software that I use every day. Now I have to upgrade my acrobat output converter and put on a big mathematical package that I use and I'll be home free. So far Vista has worked very well. It took me some time to figure out how to shut the machine down. It seems that Vista prefers kind of a half sleep and half hibernate mode
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