Using the new beta version (2008) of Windows Live Writer to post this. I’ve been a fan of WLW for awhile now and they really do just keep making it better.

Of course, now that they’ve rolled all these Live services into one installer, trying to just get Live Writer involves a whole lot of unchecking options during the installation. Can’t say I’m a big fan of that.

I’m trying out Open Office, which isn’t really a new thing for me, but the fact that I’m doing it at work is pretty new. It seems that our attempt to add two laptops to our pool of machines to be used at trial has hit one large roadblock. Namely, we can’t get them with Dell OEM Office 2003. Only 2007 is available. Apparently, we are also limited from adding a couple of licenses to our existing Office volume license, which would give us downgrade rights to load 2003, since MS only sells them in batches of 5.

So, it appears our choices are to force the users of this laptops to learn Office 2007 even though they use 2003 on a daily basis, buy 3 more licenses than we need, or experiment with Open Office to see if we can get all the features we would use at trial without paying for Office.

It’ll be an interesting experiment. Obviously, we couldn’t replace Office across the organization, but as with much open source and free software, there are some limited situations where it could be very useful.

One thing that I immediately found interesting though, for our 2003 users the menus of Open Office actually will seem a lot more familiar than Office 2007′s ribbon would! So that’s a plus.

We’ll see how my experiments go, and when the laptops get shipped to us, I’ll be able to really put them through the typical trial setup and see what happens.

Twice in the last week, when I logged on to my laptop, “Windows was unable to load my profile”. It loaded a generic, temporary profile instead. Both times a quick restart fixed the problem, but I wonder if this is a sign of bad things to come? Maybe it’s time to do some disk utilities on it and see what’s happening.

The other night, I told you about iTunes crashing, and 17 song files going “poof”. It was weird, but since I had a pretty recent backup of my music files on an external drive, I didn’t worry too much about it. The next time I cranked up the PC, however, I was greeted with the Chkdsk utility. I figured, what the heck, and let it run.

It fixed the “missing” iTunes music files. They’re all back where they should be and the iPod is syncing happily again without any errors.

I’m amazed. In all my years of working with PC’s, I can probably count on one hand the number of times Chkdsk, or Scandisk, actually did anything useful for me, aside from marking bad sectors. The first time my Vista machine runs it, is one of those times. Pretty cool.

I’m not holding my breath for it happening again any time soon, but I’ll take it.

Saw this in Support Alert today, and thought it’s worth publicizing. As much as the common security advice is not to run as Admin, there are a number of tools that simply don’t work without the Admin rights. It’s frustrating.

Programs That Won’t Run in a Limited User Account
Working with a Windows limited users account is a good way of reducing the chance of getting infected by malware. Unfortunately many poorly written programs won’t work properly in a limited account. These sites list some of the worst offenders:
http://www.threatcode.com/admin_rights.htm
http://www.pluralsight.com/wiki/default.aspx/Keith/HallOfShame.html

Just a few things that have struck me about my new Vista machine:

OK, so Dell announced on June 18 that they were going to allow customers the option to not have some pre-installed software. I ordered my system the week before that and saw that option, how new is it really? This system came pretty clean, although the Roxio Drag and Copy program apparently uses a driver that isn’t compatible with Vista. There’s nothing like the feeling of starting up a PC and being told there’s an incompatible driver in the software that came with it.

To be fair to Dell, I was prompted to get an update to Roxio on my first boot, and it was the second boot where this problem started, it may well have been a Roxio update.

Other than that, and iTunes losing all my podcast subscriptions because the XML file got corrupted, I’ve been enjoying the new machine. I can especially see where Office 2007 is really helped by the increased RAM and Vista OS. Outlook 2007, which is a real system drag on my laptop, hums along pretty nicely on this machine.

Now I just need to continue getting all the various tools setup and getting used to where things are in the menus and options, and I’ll be uber-productive at home like I am at work.

Speaking of work, I also spent a good part of my work day doing the same thing to that machine after replacing the hard drive and re-installing XP. Somehow, I’m still not getting burned out on tweaking new machines, go figure!

I didn’t even realize that Microsoft had disabled the ability to dock the quick launch bar on the right or left of the screen, forcing it to stay down with the taskbar. That is, I didn’t realize it until I just tried to move mine! Since I like to hide all the desktop icons and just have a toolbar along the right side of my screen to launch programs, I wasn’t very happy about that. Luckily, I found a little tutorial on YouTube and learned how to workaround Microsoft’s decision.

In case you ever run into a laptop like the one I did today, where you had to reload applications, the Internet activation of Office 2003 failed and you couldn’t get the phone activation information to come up. From KB article 875452:

SYMPTOMS
The Microsoft Office 2003 Activation Wizard disappears when you use the telephone option to activate a Microsoft Office 2003 license.

CAUSE
This behavior occurs if the following conditions are true:
• You have activation information on your computer that is from a previous installation of Microsoft Office 2003.
• You activated the previous installation of Office 2003 by using the Internet.

RESOLUTION
To resolve this behavior, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type the following location:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Data
3. Click OK.
4. Right-click the opa11.dat file, and then click Delete.
5. Close the folder, and then start any Microsoft Office 2003 program to start the Office 2003 Activation Wizard.

One of our attorneys asked me an interesting question the other day. Actually, the question was as interesting as the tone of her voice.

It seems that she has recently purchased a brand new laptop with Vista/Office 2007 on it. She was sharing this information with me when she suddenly got this very frightened look on her face. She proceeded to ask “We’re not going to be moving to that soon are we?”. I assured her it would be quite a while before we did that. (We haven’t even finished rolling out Office 2003!) She breathed a sigh of relief at that, explaining that it had taken her over 5 minutes to simply find the Start menu and open Word, and when she did, she was blown away by what came up!

Perhaps, by the time we actually roll it out she’ll have gotten plenty used to using it on her own laptop, but it certainly goes to show that there is a pretty serious learning curve to Vista and Office 2007 for average users.

How many of your average users have been exposed to Vista/Office 2007? What has their response been?

You know what I really love about Office 2007? Microsoft finally got wise to the number of people who make changes to email attachments and lose them.

We don’t use Office 2007 at work, and I can’t tell you how many times we get phone calls at the helpdesk because someone opened a Word document from an email attachment, made changes to it, hit save, closed it, and couldn’t find it again. No matter how many times we tell people that documents they get as attachments are not in our document management system, and that hitting save doesn’t magically get them into our document management system, I still find myself navigating to someone’s OLK”X” folder on their C drive remotely to grab the document they saved there once a week or so. (And yes, if you really want to have fun, try explaining to them how they could do that themselves the next time. Ever tried to navigate to your local OLK folder?)

When I open a Word attachment with 2007 and hit save, Word doesn’t just save in the same place, it forces me to file it somewhere. It’s about time!