Archive for June, 2007

The start of my Office 2007 woes

Around the office I am more often than not turned to as the technology/computer/network/database/website/email expert. I really wish we had an IT tech or something.

Some users in the office recently were given Office 2007 on their PCs. Why some and not all I don’t understand, but already I’ve had many complaints about it. I’ve never used or even seen Office 2007 until this, and quite frankly don’t ever want too.

But sadly, I know that I will have to as part of my extra-employment activities.

I’ve already had one or two on how the interface works and a good discussion on how the new file formats will (or most likely won’t) work in the context of the office. In our case they certainly won’t work as people are creating new documents in Office 2007, which other staff simply can’t read. I don’t want to be around when this blows out.

But the most interesting was one this morning. Office 2007 killed the spelling tool in Outlook Express. One of our staff is using Windows XP (and Outlook-Express) and since someone installed Office 2007 on his PC it has completely borked his Outlook Express spell checker.

It tries to correct almost every word, yet offers no sensible alternative, whilst also denying the ability to add the proper word to the dictionary.

For example, this ordinary sentence;

Dear <Name>,
Please find attached the latest price list ... <blah, blah , blah>

The spell check will query the following words;

Please, find, attached, latest, price, list

While this person was fuming over the inability to spell check their emails, without using Word 2007 as an intermediate step, I was quietly laughing (and cringing) in my cup of coffee.




Finally Fixed My Feisty Freezes

I went back to Edgy.

Sorry for the misleading title.  I just couldn’t get anywhere with Feisty, and I’d had enough.
Down-grading was an issue-and-a-half too; a week full of frustration.

I went for my Ubuntu Edgy CD, but after installing was unable to log into a GNOME session, the screen froze before anything had loaded. I tried the same thing with my Xubuntu Edgy CD and was able to log into a XFCE session, but not a GNOME one.

After squeezing my home folder into some backup space, I re-installed this time starting with the /home folder fresh. This time there was no problem getting into GNOME so I assumed there was some configuration issue.

After copying back most of my /home folder, save any .gnome, .gnome2, etc folders, I proceeded to re-install all the programs I need, only to find the same freeze on starting a GNOME session.

Rather than re-installing (I was getting pretty hot around the collar), I worked my way through each configuration file; finally resting on my ALSA sound configuration file; .asoundrc.

I don’t know what’s wrong with it, as it hasn’t changed since I got my sound card working a while back. I do miss surround sound, but for now I’m just happy to have a working, non-freezing PC.


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