pbray

Well to conserve braincells I try to keep my home PC in synch with the work PC, and at dayjob IE 7 is strictly verboten. But hey, I can be a little flexible.

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Not to mention the Randomly Nonworking USB Port of Doom. I've got one of those, so I assume ever computer does.

IE 7 haz ues. Uze 2 go online and downloads firefox.

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Must get latest firefox.

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(waves arms)
fiiiirrefooooooxxx....

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Now we're authorized to use it at work too, so it will be an easy switch.

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Oh. lucky!

We have to beg and plead to be allowed to use the internet at all.

Along the lines of, "How am I supposed to help people file for financial aid and search for training programs if I can't get online?"

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Welcome home, disinfected!PC! ;)

Condolences on the IE7. At least you didn't unexpectedly wind up with Office 2007, like my boss did when our sysadmin "fixed" her laptop -- it took her a week to figure out how to do basic Word tasks like changing margins and deleting table rows. And of what earthly use is a word-processing program that won't let you write macros?? /rant

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At my dayjob the first thing they do with all new computers is scrub off IE 7 (or 8) and Office 2007, and reinstall IE 6 and MS Office 2003 :-)

Gotta love tradition, or the sheer weight of inertia of trying to migrate ##### employees and and a frightening number of application software packages.

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HA! I knew it couldn't be just my company clinging to Office 2003 (or, for the copy editors, Office 2000).

Is this what they call the "installed base problem"? (I ran across that term in a law-reform article last week, believe it or not...)

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Part of it is the "installed base" problem, but most of it is third party software packages that only work with Office 2003 and either a) we're too cheap to buy the upgrade for their software that makes it work with 2007 or b) that company has stopped upgrading their software but we're dependent upon it (see installed base problem above) so in order to keep using Outdated product A we have to use Office 2003 to talk to it.

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Ayup. Third-party products are one reason we've stuck with 2000 and 2003, also: there are all these nifty file-cleanup macros (homemade and commercial) that save a LOT of copy-editing time, and Word 2007 isn't allowed to run 'em.

Also: authors and editors who have Office 2007 can read our Word 2000/2003 files, but authors/editors without Office 2007 might or might not be able to read any Word 2007 files we sent them. (Of course, for proofs we use PDF, but other kinds of files are circulated mostly in Word/RTF or Excel or PowerPoint format.)

Primarily, though, it's that the functions we use most often, and depend on most, work better in the older versions. I have concluded that, inexplicably, the programmers at Microsoft just aren't building their software with the needs of academic copy editors foremost in their minds ...

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We had the 2007 vs 2003 issue with

jpsorrow where his new laptop has Word 2007 but his critique partners are all on 2003 and the free conversion tool does bizarre things with formatting. So now we just make him save it as .DOC before sending it to us.

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There's also a patch-thingy you can get that magically makes earlier versions of Word able to open the dreaded *.docx files.

Either way, Microsoft has effectively downloaded responsibility for backwards compatibility onto its users. ::sound of one hand clapping::

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Well I didn't have use of my personal PC for a week. I spent about 25-30 hours trying to fix the problem myself before I gave up on Friday morning and handed it over to the professionals. Luckily I have the dayjob laptop so was not wholly internet deprived.

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By the way, the time estimate isn't because my computer skils are outdated (which they are, for Windows stuff), but mostly because full disk scans and virus cleaning programs generally take an hour or two to run, so multiple runs are giant time sinks.

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aeriedraconia.livejournal.com

OMG yes, time sink hell! *Snore*

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aeriedraconia.livejournal.com

Yep, IE7 stinks (iz too skeeered to try IE8). I recommend Firefox. I love Opera best but it isn't as compatible. Boo hoo.

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Firefox looks good so it's just a question of downloading it-- I have a version that's 2-3 years old that I played around with for a while, but need to get the new one.

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aeriedraconia.livejournal.com

The new one feels a little faster to me (too slow was the reason I didn't take to the earlier version of Firefox). Plus, Almost all sites are Firefox friendly these days.

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Also, it will save your tabs for you, which can be really useful.

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Yes. At first I thought, "Who cares about that?" but then the day came when I was on a website that I knew I needed to visit again, just not often enough to bookmark, and I said to myself, "Self, let's ask it to save the tabs." And Lo, it was so, such that on the following evening, when I turned on my computer and did launch Firefox, verily were my tabs even as they had been when I shut down.

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::nods::

I've been using it to keep on hand half a dozen separate but interrelated pages explaining the technical submission requirements for getting a journal accepted into the PubMedCentral database, because I don't think I could necessarily find all of them again unaided :P

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