Go Microsoft!!!

Roger Wright

Wow! What a great way to generate revenue! I just tried to reinstall MS Works on my machine - Word costs too much and has no functionality of any value beyond what Works offers. After cranking through all the startup screens and 'preparing my computer' it demands that I insert the Works2000 disk. Where the hell does it think I found the installer? Clicking 'Retry' a dozen times didn't help - unbephuquinglievable! Do these things have some kind of timestamp on them to ensure that if you ever have to re-install a product, you also have to repurchase it? Based upon my experience managing Boeing contracts and using Microsoft products, I sincerely believe that if incompetence was a fatal disease, the Seattle region would be occupied solely by small fishing villages. "Please don't put cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light" - Sign in a Bullhead City, AZ Restroom

ColinDavies

Funny, I have been going through similar issues lately. I discovered an old copy of MS Office 2000 Profesional the other day. It's not currently installed on any boxes or anything, but NO I don't really own it although I paid for it, it will ownly let me run it 50 times for some reason then it claims it will expire. So back to notepad.exe I go. :-) I think your MS Works must be writing a key somewhere. Also MS seem to have gone into a tailspin of thinking that if you install a new version or a service pack you'll never want to undo it. Eg the Media player and directX hassles. The real principle behind it is to continue to make people to upgrade or they will eventually be incompatible with the rest of the IT society. Regardz Colin J Davies

Sonork ID 100.9197:Colin

I'm guessing the concept of a 2 hour movie showing two guys eating a meal and talking struck them as 'foreign' Rob Manderson wrote:

Roger Wright

It gets better... the same thing happenned when I tried to re-install Access2000. It told me that I have to have IE 5.0 or better installed to make it work; it refused to recognize IE6 as a compatible product! A note to developers - make sure that your installer can tell when a customer has upgraded a dependent product. Something that surprised me, though, was that installing VS6 didn't require me to install previous versions - I bought the upgrade version, and it should have checked for a previous version before installing. It didn't, and for that I'm very thankful as installing its predecessor fails if I don't install IE4.02. For that tiny favor, thank you, Microsoft. An upgrade installer should not check that a prior product is installed, but should check that a qualifying product has been registered. This seems to be the way that the VS6 upgrade was handled, and it works... "Please don't put cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light" - Sign in a Bullhead City, AZ Restroom

Kannan Kalyanaraman

Colin Davies wrote: the Media player and directX hassles. In WinXP it asked me for creating snapshots, so that I can revert back (instead of uninstall) later. Also the same case with XP SP1, I believe its a good thing to set snapshots and then revert back if you dont want. Its not just MS , look at Intel they need to sell faster processors and they've so far managed to convince people that you need p4 to listen to songs and browse the web :-) regards Kannan

Lost User

Roger Wright wrote: I just tried to reinstall MS Works on my machine OK, there goes all respect I ever had for you Roger. ;P ;P Mike Mullikin :beer:

"I'm not calling you a liar but....I can't think of a way to finish that sentence." - Bart Simpson

Roger Wright

:laugh::laugh: I know - real programmers use VI! But sometimes I need a prettied-up document, and Office is a bloated, grossly overpriced piece of crap. Borland's Sprint did a better job of making professional documents, and it cost all of $49. For most purposes I prefer Notepads... either MS or the quad-ruled paper variety. "Please don't put cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light" - Sign in a Bullhead City, AZ Restroom