I can haz PC

[pbray]

Desktop is back home, cleaned, scrubbed, disinfected. New antivirus, antispyware and firewall software. All of my personal files seem to be on here, which is much goodness, but somehow in the process of fixing Windows XP I got a special bonus--an upgrade to Internet Explorer Version 7. Sigh.

And, of course, it took me over half an hour to get everything recabled up correctly. Nothing like working in tight spaces and trying to plug in cords blindly because things don't quite stretch far enough.

Ah well. All things considered, life is good.

Comments

[pbray.livejournal.com]

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.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

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...)

[pbray.livejournal.com]

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upgrading their software but we're dependent upon it (see installed base problem above) so in order to keep using Outdated product A we have to use Office 2003 to talk to it.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

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 ...

[pbray.livejournal.com]

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.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

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::