"Charlie Pridham" wrote in message
...
Thanks to a lightening strike I have had to replace one of our machines,
the
new one has "Vista" (I expect I will get used to it in time!)
The point of this posting is just to say that while much of my old third
party software has gone on without a murmur the same was not true of my
very
expensive MS Office (2000) and I thought people may like to know I have
solved the problem by changing to "Open Office" which so far seems
completely compatible in both directions with ms office and only costs £6
!!!

--
Charlie, Gardening in Cornwall
http://www.roselandhouse.co.uk
Holders of National collections of Clematis viticella
and Lapageria rosea cultivars


I'm avoiding Vista for as long as possible (I'm a professional software
developer) and the majority of my business colleagues are avoiding it too -
other than to try it out and prod and poke it without using it in any
serious way yet. It is too slow, takes too much memory, has a huge amount of
irrelevant bloat and has compatibility problems with numerous pieces of
software and hardware.

So until it is forced upon us by the demise of XP we are avoiding it like
the plague! It is also proving to be a support headache too, with the
increased security affecting it's ability to run various programs which just
leave end users baffled when their favourite program starts coughing up
error messages or Vista spews out security messages. Pile of poo in my
professional opinion, just another money spinner for Microsoft with
questionable benefits for everyone else - and this from someone who makes
his living writing software to run on Microsoft computers!

David.