Official Luthiers Forum!

I have just got a new Laptop (love those boxingday sales) and am installing programs and have both Microsoft Office 200 and XP and am wondering which is better and which I should install. In my old computer I always just used windows 2000 and am used to it but if XP is better why not. I mainly use Frontpage, word and Publisher. I am sure their are other programs out there that are much better but I am not planning to go out and buy any new software so these are my choices.

A disclaimer: I am an engineer that has worked for Microsoft for the past 12 years but do not know much about licensing or other sales related things.

Microsoft's stances towards support for versions is that all versions are supported with mainstream support (updates, patches and fixes) for 5 years and then 5 years of extended support which requires a support contract for that product. This is what most enterprise customers do.

Having said that, that means that Office 2000 is past its mainstream support period so it is less supportable than Office 2003 which was released in 2003. There are additional new features in Office 2003 that you may or may not use but in general the supportability alone is the most compelling reason to use Office XP over Office 2000. Office 2003 can read all previous versions of Office documents so compatibility is not an issue.

By the way, the same considerations should be considered regarding versions of Windows as well.

are office XP and Office 2003 the same thing?

Richard, no they are not the same.

I've had XP and kept having problems with it. Get the XP Pro if you can as it seems to be more stable...

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I'd like to be able to prove, just for once, that money wouldn't make me happy...

Actually it is office 200 premium and office XP pro That I have.

If I remember correctly, the Office that came bundled with Sweetie's laptop in '03 (XP home edition) wasn't the office programs we expected. Word files were not doc files they are wsp (I think) files that aren't Word Perfect file format nor is it a file format that Word, as we think of it, can read. It works, but sharing files is a major hassle. You have to save them as rich text files. We ended up getting the real Office.

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Aoibeann