Is this another fine mess they could be getting into?

UK government plans switch to open source from Microsoft office suite

I think they may have been better advised to have gone to Ms and negotiated a better deal for Office Home which is half the price, rather than Office Pro. When you are talking 10's of thousands of licences, you hold a winning hand.

Perhaps they will, maybe this announcement is a scare tactic so Microsoft are on the back foot when negotiations begin and thus may be more likely to lower the price.

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Life on earth is the global equivalent of not storing things in the fridge.

Pigs will be seen flying before that ever happens.

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A question for power users of MSOffice (please, no interruptions quoting Open/Libra Office}.

Back in the good old days of MSOffice 4.3, using file manager I was able to access both Word's dictionary and the custom one as back then there were too many Americanisms (no offence guys).

Colour me dumb, but in Office 2007/2010, I cannot find those dictionaries to edit them.

Does anyone know where they are hidden and how I access them?

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Is this what you're looking for?

Is this what you're looking for?

Thanks Oz, much appreciated. I did not have to follow all the way through as following their instructions, I found the file path for what I want.....

C:\Users\********\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof - That's where the custom dictionary is located, if anyone else needs to know.

Now all I need to do is to find Office's main dictionary path :(

********* is what account is being used.

I've bookmarked that, so thanks again Oz.

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http://www.techmadeeasy.co.uk/2011/05/19/how-to-change-the-dictionary-language-in-microsoft-office/

Thanks but not what was asked.

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C:\Users\********\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof - That's where the custom dictionary is located, if anyone else needs to know.

Also the file path for the default custom dictionary is here...

C:\Users\**********\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Spelling\en-GB\default.dic.

Region specific folder

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Thanks very much Apple - Not!

Anyone else experienced the dreaded error 7 (windows error 126) after getting the apple software update pop up, and downloading Itunes update?

It seems that it's not a new problem.

Itunes error 7

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An interesting report.

Win back the base

"Windows 98 was a success.
Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was a failure.
Windows XP was a success.
Windows Vista was a failure.
Windows 7 was a success.
Windows 8 was a failure.
Windows 9 ... ?

That's a big task. It's a bigger task than what the company had to do between Vista and Windows 7, and that was a miraculous turnaround. Don't underestimate Microsoft in this, but don't underestimate the size of the task, either."

Will they succeed, or will another Ballmer step up?

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Pardon my failing memory, but weren't there actually 2 versions of Win 95 ? Similar to 98 and 98SE

And IIRC, XP was not well looked apon until SP1 and didn't really start to "cook" until SP2.

There used to be a Golden Rule "that you don't buy a new MS operating system until after the release of the first service pack".

T.A.

Pardon my failing memory, but weren't there actually 2 versions of Win 95 ? Similar to 98 and 98SE

And IIRC, XP was not well looked apon until SP1 and didn't really start to "cook" until SP2.

There used to be a Golden Rule "that you don't buy a new MS operating system until after the release of the first service pack".

T.A.

Actually there were 5 and it was 95C that was the good 1.

Microsoft went on to release five different versions of Windows 95:

Windows 95 - original release
Windows 95 A - included Windows 95 OSR1 slipstreamed into the installation.
Windows 95 B - (OSR2) included several major enhancements, Internet Explorer (IE) 3.0 and full FAT32 file system support.
Windows 95 B USB - (OSR2.1) included basic USB support.
Windows 95 C - (OSR2.5) included all the above features, plus IE 4.0. This was the last 95 version produced.

Cheers.

Windows 7 with SP 1 has turned out to be a PITA for me. Incessant updates, ISO errors that have to be manually patched, and applications that just crash with nothing posted to the logs.

Weird. I've been using Windows 7 since it came out; updated to SP1 as soon as it was released and not experienced such issues. If you're experiencing crashes, you should download WinDbg to go over the minidump and memory dumps to find the cause.

Which is why I'm currently assembling some linux boxes. Linux doesn't put you through incessant updates, unexplained application crashes and auto reboots at 3AM.

I beg to differ. I keep playing around with Linux distros to see how the other side of the "pond" is doing and find that updates are released just as frequently, especially the older it gets, just like in Windows. They're still prone to unexplained SIGSIEV errors, though they have reduced in frequency just like BSODs.

Auto-reboots are typically the result of updates being installed. If that's not the culprit, you might have a hardware issue, in which case Linux isn't going to solve that.

Actually there were 5 and it was 95C that was the good 1.

Microsoft went on to release five different versions of Windows 95:

Windows 95 - original release
Windows 95 A - included Windows 95 OSR1 slipstreamed into the installation.
Windows 95 B - (OSR2) included several major enhancements, Internet Explorer (IE) 3.0 and full FAT32 file system support.
Windows 95 B USB - (OSR2.1) included basic USB support.
Windows 95 C - (OSR2.5) included all the above features, plus IE 4.0. This was the last 95 version produced.

Cheers.

Windows 95 B also added support for AGP and fixed buggy support for MMX. It wasn't until Windows 95 C that the bugs in the P6 (Pentium Pro/Pentium II) architecture was fixed.

Yes, Win 95 had a difficult birth to say the least, but it was such a complete culture change from WFWG 3.11, I suppose it was understandable.

Not sure if you're just referring to the GUI here, but under the hood, many of the so-called "new" features of the original Windows 95 release were built into WfW 3.11. Most performance gains were realized simply by the addition of 32bit File Access (32bit Disk Access was already included in Windows 3.1). 32bit networking and 32bit printing were also there in WfW 3.11. In fact, it almost appears that Windows 95 was WfW with a new shell slapped on top, and a few other things thrown in for good measure. Most of the 16bit code in Windows 95, and there were a lot of it, remained from WfW 3.11.

What seemed to cause MS the most problems wwas the transition from 16 -> 32 -> 64 bit computing.

Agreed with the 16- to 32bit transition, but I think the 32- to 64bit transition has gone much smoother and unfortunately with less fanfare.

But, gone are the days of 3 disks to install DOS 6.22, then 20 disks to install windows on top of it!

I remain an Honorary Life Member of the MSDOS 5 Appreciation Society. We meet once a year and bang Zimmer frames while sipping Sanatogen :-))

I'm sure the first sentence was a bit of exaggeration for fun, but I've recently resurrected an old Pentium 133 on an original Intel 430VX chipset (maximum cacheable RAM: 64MB, which I have maxed out with super-fast 60ns EDO RAM), and I just finished putting DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 on there. They came as a packaged deal and totaled 8 disks. My WfW 3.11 upgrade is only another 7 disks. :-)

Had a heck of a time installing DOS and Windows because every time I attempted to partition and format the hard drive, the system would lock up. I couldn't even use a previously DOS-formatted disk to boot from, nor could I boot off of OS/2 Warp 3 or NT 4 boot floppies. I thought it was the disk controller messing up, so I threw in a spare Promise Ultra/33 card but made no difference. Double-checked all the jumper settings on the motherboard and found a few set incorrectly (thankfully I still have the manual), but that made no difference either.

I thought that maybe it was a power related issue so I put the motherboard into a different AT case; same behavior. So I put it back in the original case and go into the BIOS and turn off all the performance-enhancing options, and lo and behold, it booted from the hard disk! Slowly started turning options back on, the first being turning back on the L1 and L2 caches, and it froze again. Turned off L2 and it booted 3 out of 3 times. Bad L2 cache! So now performance is going to suffer. :-(

Meh, it was a fun project, and we'll see what kind of DOS gamer this thing turns out to be. <sigh> I do miss the old days. Debating on if I should upgrade this thing to DOS 6 merely because I prefer the output of MEM.EXE and the addition of SCANDISK.EXE, or I could put on Norton 8.0 for DOS and Windows. :-) Oh the choices. :-)

Meh, it was a fun project, and we'll see what kind of DOS gamer this thing turns out to be. <sigh> I do miss the old days. Debating on if I should upgrade this thing to DOS 6 merely because I prefer the output of MEM.EXE and the addition of SCANDISK.EXE, or I could put on Norton 8.0 for DOS and Windows. :-) Oh the choices. :-)

:( Some of those old DOS games were too damned addictive.

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Interesting time ahead.

What Microsoft can learn from its co-founder

And finally, to put the myth to sleep for good regarding Bill Gates.....

"Outsiders have always had the idea that Gates was responsible for everything at Microsoft, but actually, he hired and backed some very smart people."

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"The Hyderabad-born executive joined the company in 1992 and has degrees in electronics, computer science and business administration."

Hence the interesting times ahead comment.

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