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Does Microsoft Office still have value?

Because my laptop doesn’t have a working screen at the moment (thank goodness for my second monitor), I’m researching repair versus purchase. I have looked at *a lot* of computers in the last week.

I’ve had the impression, thanks mostly to Dell’s barrage of emails, that laptops are getting cheaper and cheaper. Now that I’ve done the research, I can spot the scam.

The stores (online or offline) are filled with computer deals - mostly laptops in the $500 range. But now I know I could never get one that cheap. What do you get for $500?

• 1 gig of RAM, when Windows requires 2.
• 1 year of service, when you need a minimum of 2 (I’d recommend 3).
• No so-called “productivity suite” when most of us still need a word processor and a spreadsheet program.

I also can’t imagine getting a new laptop in 2008 without putting in it an extra $50 for the best wifi card available, and I wouldn’t buy one with less than 100 gigs of harddrive space. And then there’s the “Vista” issue: do you really want that junk on a computer you rely on?

When it’s all said and done, I can’t see buying a computer today for less than about $1100.

So I’m wondering which corners can be cut. For $150-$250, do I really need M$ Word and Excel when I can get pretty much the same thing for absolutely nothing? Are there really any benefits of paying for the same thing? What do you get for your $?

Tags: computer, M$, question, tech

I hate Windows

Yes, I’m talking the OS, not the kind made of glass that helps brighten up the room.

Yesterday, I finally got around to running Windows update on my computer. It turns out, yesterday’s update was a biggie - service pack 3, as a matter of fact. And thanks to that lovely update, M$ turned automatic updates back on for my computer.

I hate this. Frankly, it makes me extremely angry that they feel the need to do this without my permission.

Why do I care so much? I’ll tell you. Yesterday, I started working on a new client from Poland, and there’s a lot of stuff I’ve yet to learn about taxation of aliens. Currently, I’ve got a few dozen firefox tabs open and numerous pdf files. I’m running several tax programs and Excel.

But because Windows turned automatic updates back on (and I’ve obviously turned it back off now), my computer downloaded new updates a few minutes ago. Big whoop, right? Wrong. Now that the computer is newly updated, it wants to restart to make the process official. And that means that every five minutes I have to tell the computer that I don’t want it to restart. Grumble. And if I don’t happen to see the notification, it’ll just restart on me. And all of my work and research will be lost.

Grumble.

Because of M$’s penchant for junk like this, I rarely do updates on this computer. I can’t always just restart the computer at the drop of a hat because M$ wants me to. Why can’t it just install the updates the next time I turn the computer off?

Why does Windows have to be such a lousy OS? When will my tax software be usable in an OS that cares about its users?

Tags: computer, linux, M$, ubuntu, work