What's the verdict on Windows 7?

[Bozo]

What's the matter with Open Office?

 

[timwhit]

What's the matter with Open Office?

I use O and Google Docs at home. Org is nice for some things I've tried to do in it and makes other things half impossible. Have you ever done a mail merge in O? It took me a good two hours before I was able to understand how it's supposed to work.

Google Docs is nice for simple spreadsheets and documents. I really like the way it facilitates collaboration.

 

[Handruin]

I upgraded from 2003 to 2007 for a specific feature in Excel that I needed. In Excel in office 2003, you're limited to opening a spreadsheet with somewhere around 65K rows. I often times need more than that for some work I'm doing when capturing performance statistics in CSV format and needing averages and charts, etc with lots of data points. Excel in Office 2007 allows me to go way beyond the 65K rows. Other than that, I didn't need to upgrade anything and my use of Excel is likely an edge-case and not needed by most people.

 

[sechs]

100+ installs without issue.

I install it, printing stops working. Random crashing.

Uninstall it, no crashes and printing works as before.

I see an association. Maybe it didn't like my thousands of fonts?

 

[Mercutio]

What's the matter with Open Office?

For about 90% of people who have an office suite on their computer, I'd say absolutely nothing.

 

[time]

Sechs, I've had vaguely similar problems with an MSDN-sourced copy of Office 2007 Pro. Try to print certain documents, and it crashes with a particular target printer. Obviously I've tried different printer drivers, reinstalling Office and installing the latest patches. No problems with other PCs running a different edition of Office.

 

[time]

For about 90% of people who have an office suite on their computer, I'd say absolutely nothing.

I used to say that too, but my daughters have set me straight in no uncertain terms: OO Writer sucks. You can type a memo okay but anything much more complex is a problem. I've also given up on OO because their claims of MS compatibility are just lies and they've made no real effort to improve it over the last couple of years.

In contrast, I'm impressed that MS Office 2010 can open my old WordPerfect documents without screwing up the formatting of tables and headers/footers.

I can't believe I'm standing here defending M$. I detest almost everything they've ever produced.

 

[time]

The problem with the 90% rule is that while strictly correct, you never know which 90% ...

In the past, I've attempted to foist simple word processors on people who I thought would never need to do anything other than type memos, but ended up with egg on my face.

 

[ddrueding]

The problem with the 90% rule is that while strictly correct, you never know which 90% ...

In the past, I've attempted to foist simple word processors on people who I thought would never need to do anything other than type memos, but ended up with egg on my face.

I start by giving them the choice. Something that is easier to use, easier to access, cheaper, and easier to share documents with, that might not be able to do some obscure stuff.

I've also noticed these guys put out better documents, because they aren't spending all day screwing with fonts and goofy text alignment in boxes.

 

[CougTek]

I usually win home users to OpenOffice's cause by saying : this one is free and the other one cost 150$. Can you live with a few formatting differences? The answer is most of the time "yes".

 

[Mercutio]

A new annoyance with Windows 7: It seems to prefer a wireless connection over a wired connection when both connections are present. I thought this might just be a driver issue, but I had the opportunity last night to test several different Win7 notebooks and I found they all did the same thing.

If you set up a wireless client someplace where there's a shaky 802.11 signal, you'll see the usual effects of a shaky wireless signal, even if you're also connected with an ethernet cable. The only way I've found to reliably force Win7 to use the wire is to disable 802.11 entirely.

 

[ddrueding]

Confirmed here. Never noticed before as my laptops all have physical switches to disable wireless that I use regularly.

 

[BingBangBop]

A new annoyance with Windows 7: It seems to prefer a wireless connection over a wired connection when both connections are present. I thought this might just be a driver issue, but I had the opportunity last night to test several different Win7 notebooks and I found they all did the same thing.

If you set up a wireless client someplace where there's a shaky 802.11 signal, you'll see the usual effects of a shaky wireless signal, even if you're also connected with an ethernet cable. The only way I've found to reliably force Win7 to use the wire is to disable 802.11 entirely.

Ethernet does not like multiple routes to the same computer/network. It create routing loops (and Ethernet does not like loops) which is why there is a spanning-tree protocol (to be used when path redundancy is required) which turns off duplicate ports until the preferred port has failed. I do not think that any version of Windows has ever implemented the spanning-tree protocol for multiple connections. I think it would be a very good thing if Microsoft did, though.

 

[Handruin]

I never really noticed that either, but out of habit and my own belief of causing loops or problems, I do the same as David and just click off the physical switch to disable WiFi while using a cabled connection.

I do remember seeing an option in the Lenovo Access connections software to make certain connections a priority, but of course that only helps if you're configuring a Lenovo system. I don't remember if it disconnects my WiFi if I plug in the cable though.

 

[Stereodude]

At my last job I often had 2 NIC's active. Windows XP favored the wired connection and some applications like Firefox no issues switching between them as I plugged into and unplugged from the wired network. IE 6.0 (corporate standard) didn't like changing networks and often had to be closed and restarted.

 

[Mercutio]

Ethernet does not like multiple routes to the same computer/network.

Modern versions of Windows certainly are aware of my connection type and how much bandwidth is available on those connections. I'm just not sure why it it always prioritizes the unreliable, low-speed wireless connections over a faster, more reliable one.

I usually do have the Lenovo Access Manager on my Thinkpads, which might explain why I didn't notice this in previous Windows versions.

 

[Bozo]

If you right click 'Network', click 'Properties', click 'Change Adapter Settings', click 'Advanced', then click 'Advanced Settings' you can prioritize your connections.

I don't have wireless, but I think this might help.

 

[BingBangBop]

If you right click 'Network', click 'Properties', click 'Change Adapter Settings', click 'Advanced', then click 'Advanced Settings' you can prioritize your connections.

I don't have wireless, but I think this might help.

You are correct, Thanks. I had never seen that before. Learn something everyday!

 

[Santilli]

THANK YOU. Now let's see if it works...

 

[time]

Thanks Bozo.

Under XP, it's Network Connections - Advanced - Advanced Settings.

When I tried this on an XP laptop, the wireless connection always authenticated first after login, leaving the wired connection in limbo. So it was still necessary to disable the wireless adapter to get the wired one working at all. Once this occurred, I was able to re-enable the wireless adapter. Pretty dumb.

 

[Santilli]

Tried changing the priortiy for connections, nothing. Still have to use run, and the cards IP address to get gigabyte speeds
between the two machines.

New annoyance. LOTS of slow downs lately. Seems indexing is running at shutdown, and, with 3 1.4 gig drives, it effectively was freezing the machine on shutdown. I no longer use indexing on my big storage drives.

Next, background junk, freezing the gui. HOW, with a 7.8 on the index BEAST I'm getting a gui freezing, while 7 is downloading updates, and, Adobe is doing the same, and, I'm using like 2% processor, just tells me the guys that wrote parts of this are RETARDED.

Solution was rolling back to about 8/4 using system restore, and, it might also be in part due to OmniForm, but I doubt it. Turned off auto updates in both adobe and the OS.

Back to having a snappy system.

 

[Santilli]

Turned off defender as well. ESET is enough. Auto updates as well. Also looked through msconfig. Adobe puts WAY too much auto garbage in the startup folder.