My 2 cents worth
G'day guys,
This is my first post here, though I won't go about introducing myself, just keep it shortish!
I have windows 7 RC, upgraded directly from windows vista home premium. I love W7 functionality, of course there are a few hiccups, which until lately haven't caused me much concern, due to only using MS office word 07 for personal use. Now that I'm about to continue with further studies, it was crucial I sorted out my issue to allow a smooth transition.
Unfortunately, upto today I haven't taken alot of notice with how word 07 (W7 platform) was behaving, otherwise I would have taken screen shots with onenote and referred to those in this post, therefore I will make do with those issues I recall along with what bugs me at present. Details of which are below.
When I attempted to open a file from an external hard drive, the default program (MS office word 07) opened without the document displaying, however 3 previous unsaved (unnamed) documents were located in the recovery pane. My explaination of this is, I have Norton 360 Version 3, which often requests a restart of my computer after automatically running scans and will automatically restart the computer within 10 minutes if I don't choose an option (1 or 4 hours).
Of course I could apply some personal management of the computers system, although this would defeat real-time testing of the Microsoft document recovery function, anyone studying would understand where I'm coming from and know losing large portions of an assignment isn't constructive in any shape or form.
Getting back to the point of this post. I'd attempted several different methods to open the file i.e. opening or saving the recovered documents to free up words resource use - which froze; closing word - which froze; ALT+CTRL+DEL - which gave an error message of some kind; restarting the computer - which lead to a 'force restart'; and finally, turning off the computer by the power button.
Upon restarting the computer, it was clear the document didn't want to budge, though I shudder at the memories of using those inferior MS operating systems of days gone by and thanked my lucky stars the file wasn't converted into a file format that hasn't been invented yet, let alone non-existent software to open it! lol Remarkably, having managed to save the recovered documents, I was still unable to open the desired document.
It appears I installed windows 7 RC around May 2009 and although I haven't always had difficulties with opening and saving office word 07 documents, I must say there were numerous occasions when I'd uninstalled Norton 360 or reconfigured its settings to allow W7 control of the firewall. Therefore lots of different circumstances were in play on previous occasions and too vast to explore in this post.
Everyone can tell you how frustrating it can sometimes be trying to install norton 360, especially since we are using the unsupported W7 RC platform and I refuse to uninstall 'N360' again unless it's absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, I located this forum and read the reply by Garymac's who posted about running the diagnostic, something I don't recall ever undertaking - even with a vista platform.
Having ran the diagnostic, here are my results. The last test within the detailed results section, titled 'Setup diagnostic', stated "The diagnostic repaired all Microsoft Office installation problems it could find. Verified 14 package(s).", meanwhile the summary of results stated:
"Diagnostics run: 6
Diagnostics that identified problems: 1
Diagnositics that took corrective actions: 1"
Admittedly, either before, during or after the diagnostic, I also went into W7 troubleshoot computer problems and clicked the wording 'run programs made for previous versions of Windows' and selected microsoft office word 2007 and followed the prompts, which opened word 07 flawlessly. Then I proceeded to open the document within word 07 and whalla, what do you know? It worked, saves perfectly, prints and all, without having turned off or uninstalled norton 360!
My recommendation, if you have extra money to splurge, purchase Microsoft works, as it incorporates a word processor. Only downside, it isn't as functional as office word 07. The other alternative is to download Openoffice (it's free), which incorporates a writer (word) processor. Personally, I have all three and they were all very handy during the last period of my studies and as of recently, Microsoft office word 07 can now quickly and simply convert Microsoft works document file formats into word file formats. YES!
I found out the hard way when I needed to print out several lengthy assignments at Office works (Australia) - who carry and stock Microsoft office 2007, although only used word 2003 on their computer systems and back in 2007, that was a real ban in the proverbial backside. Try convert word 2007 office document file formats to Microsoft works RTF file formats, just the document could be opened in word 2003, which reconfigures the layout of the original document, requiring needless time reconstructing the documents for printing that perfect assignment.
Thanks for reading and big thanks to Microsoft for listening to my previous feedback - there's more on its way!
Jesse
