Which Os is better among the Windows Vista.

You guys aren't really reading my original post are you?

I said "one button trackpad" on the Macbook laptops. Yes, I'm fully aware there's dozens of external devices I can plug in to get additional buttons, but I don't want to carry around additional devices with my laptop, I want two buttons built in to the trackpad, every other laptop manufacture offers this, so until that changes, I'll continue to buy laptops from other manufactures, period. This gripe applies specifically to *laptops*.

While I don't game much anymore myself, games are arguably the biggest pusher of PC hardware upgrades. You might be surprised by the number of home users who use special purpose apps, as well as while there's not really any specific genre missing on the Mac, there are certainly fewer choices within each. Why is "I can't run this specific Windows app" not valid? Lots of people have a liking for specific apps, not to mention they may have years of data created with that app.

How about Ventura? Corel promised a Mac version years ago, but it never appeared, probably because the market was too small.

Somebody once remarked "How many word processors do you really need? How many spreadsheets?" The answer is that a large installed OS base encourages competition and innovation.

Few apps have such restrictive data types that they're not exportable. CAD programs (which I specifically exempted because of cost) would possibly be one category.

Isaac

But aren't there Mac apps of equivalent functionality?

Which certainly explains why just about every Windows box uses MS Office.

Oh, wait...

Isaac

Mine doesn't...

Yep. I've done four Vista to XP downgrades so far, with one more scheduled. All four resulted in a computah that was at least 2 times faster than under Vista. However, the speed improvement was not the main justification. It was that Vista was incompatible with older hardware and software.

I'm dealing with one such incompatibility as I write. The customer has 4ea Samsung i700 PDAphones running Windoze Mobile 2002. He's been using them with Active Sync 5.x under XP without any difficulties. However, Vista demands that you use Active Sync 6.x which does not work with WM2002. It wants WM2003. Fortunately, I found a firmware upgrade to WM2003 for the phones, which works. However, the resultant data files cannot be moved either directly or indirectly (copying) from WM2002 to WM2003. At this point, the phones have been upgraded to what Vista demands, but nothing works. I'll eventually find a solution, but at this point, it appears that a downgrade to XP might be a better solution.

It was the same story with printers. The same customer has a 5 year old HP All-in-one contrivance that was instantly obsoleted by the lack of Vista drivers. Why should HP spend time and effort re-writing all their old drivers for printers they no longer sell? I don't blame them. So, the customer bought a brand new HP All-in-One printer to use with his new Vista box. I'm sure HP is happy with this arrangement, with a bonus that they don't have to pay Microsoft for the Vista certification.

Other customers had problems with ancient software that works perfectly, but where the vendor is more interesting in upgrading the customer (i.e. soaking them for the latest Vista compatible version) than just fixing the compatibility issues. Of course, to maintain compatibility in the future, the customer needs to buy an expensive service contract. Any semblance to extortion is strictly coincidental.

It's become a sufficiently important issue that the major OEM's are demanding that Microsoft offer a downgrade path:

Most manufacturers have instructions on how to downgrade on their support sites. For example:

With some models, that only have Vista support, the downgrade is both tricky and messy. If there are no downloadable XP drivers on the manufacturers web pile, don't do the downgrade.

Personally, I like Vista, but I probably won't use it. I like it because it generates considerable business for me in consulting and upgrades. As long as there is hardware and software out there that doesn't work, I stay in business. Incidentally, my company motto is "If this stuff worked, you wouldn't need me".

Of course not. Use an external mouse to get the full benefit.

There isn't a whole hour in which I use the computer and don't use all three buttons several times. Hasn't been for a lot of years, dating as far back as Windows 3.1 (minesweeper used the middle button to really good advantage!).

Windows

I don't think so. I haven't used every long-document product on the market. But Ventura is (or at least used to be) pretty much in a class by itself.

encourages

Exactly. The Mac base isn't large enough to support multiple, complex "office-type" products.

Mine doesn't either. I *had* been getting by with Office 98 but MS accidentally (?) broke Office98 compatibility with WinXP SP2. Goodbye MS Office, hello OpenOffice.org!

Out of curiosity I also picked up TextMaker & PlanMaker from

I'd been using Office '97 for years...no problem. You can get converters for later versions of Office files. That said, the *only* reason I used Office was because everybody else does. It's really an essential application if you do any kind of business correspondence.

Personally I preferred WordPerfect. If it would create a reasonably complex file that would open perfectly in Office (Word), I'd probably have kept it. However, anything with more than very simple graphics--even simple text boxes--has to be reformatted for Word/Office.

Open Office seems like a good idea, but it's so mind-numbingly slow to load. I tried it for about six months and finally dumped it when I got a copy of Office 2k.

jak

I'm still WordPerfect by preference but, as you note, MS compatibility is something you can't get away from. Fortunately, the shift in recent years to distributing documents in PDF format instead of raw MS Word has let me keep on WP-ing.

One thing you might try is to import your WP files into Word rather than trying to export from WP to Word. Since WP has kept the same file format since ver 6 (at least through ver 12 -- I don't have "X3" but I'd bet they have kept with the same format), MS has had a lot of time to tweak their import filter whereas WP export has to hit the moving target of the constantly changing Word formats.

Anyhoo, for those times when I'm stuck having to open Word files, I've had pretty good luck with TextMaker. It does not (yet) handle MS's "OpenXML" format but I've been pretty happy with it.

I guess enough people have forgotten the folly of using Word format files for interchange. I found that only two things can read a Word 6 file: Word 6 and StarOffice. A lot of people were burnt when Word 7 hit and before everyone updated.

Saving Word files in the Rich Text Format enables me to open them in several other applications when I need to, and gives much better cross-system results between my PCs and Macs.

And that is exactly the very worst reason to do so.

Complete nonsense. No-one needs a desktop publishing program (which is what Word has become) to type a letter.

If you need Word dot.doc file compatability you could try the free AbiWord (the only 'word processor' on my PC) , else use rtf (rich text format) files or pdfs. PDF creators are free too.

The Wordpad (or Write) program included with Windows is good enough for most letters. It's only real failing is the inability to introduce your own page breaks. I expect MS did that for fear of crippling sales of Office.

Graham

Word file format incompatabilty between different version of Word is EXACTLY why you should NEVER buy a copy of Office.

It's utter rubbish.

Graham

So why use Word in the first place ?

Graham

I loathe MS Office. It's an UN-productivity tool IME.

Has the message still not got around that Open Office is free ? If you HAVE to use a full-fat Office application, at least save yourself the indignity of paying MS for it !

Graham

I'm a freelance sound engineer and I recently got e-mailed a call sheet for a job I was doing. The only information I really needed was the start/finish times. The email itself was blank but contained three attachments. A GIF with the company logo. An HTML file with the usual legalese. And a Word document with the necessary information. Latest version of Word. From a company working in the communications field. ;-)