dhs wrote:
Thane, Richard, Chris, Greg, Anthony, Harry, et. al.
Thanks for all your discussion. Yes, confirmed "flash drive" with nephew. It appears that
the current W98SE is not dealing with the current flash drive. I suspect that this
machines OS has not been kept up to date (patches, etc.) so I'm not surprised.
Windows 98SE needs a driver for the USB storage devices, many drives do
not ship with them any more, as 98SE has been EOLed.
You should be able to download, and install the drivers. Even if the
maker of the specific flash drive does not have a driver,a google
search can often turn up a compatible driver.
I'll start pricing 80GB and 100GB drives in any case.
80-160GB drive is what I would look at, a lot of times the steps are
really close in price.
As to chosen OS and office suite, this machine is a family machine in the home. I do
not believe it will relocate to a dorm room. Maybe in the future, but not at present.
My Sister and younger Nephew (high school sophomore) use this machine also.
I'm sure that Sis would be somewhat negative to an office suite other than MS because
she volunteers as a mid-mgr for the Boy Scouts and does church work too.
She is lightly pc-literate but not a techie for sure.
Younger Nephew is the one who, at this time, "knows everything pc related."
And he's only 16. LOL! I don't dispute this possibility, but his Father and I have
already spent hours "fixing" some of his downloads and machine tweaks!
I spoke with oldest Nephew about office suites and get the impression that he is
still clueless as to what his college requirements are. I just started with a choice
that I believe offers a wide baseline for all 3 of the machine's users. Father will
most likely use this machine also, but, as it will not do MS-DOS, his use may be
limited. Father is W98SE-centric!
In my queries yesterday, I get a strong indication that all 3 users do not care for IE.
I may reccommend FireFox as an alternative, even though I believe all 3 will wish to
stay with Netscape. I get the sense that they know change of some sort is now
required, but that it be as limited as possible. Hardware and software is fairly
black and white for me. The human integration to same will be tough.
Netscape is a little bit off of the mozilla development cycle right now
(slow). I would suggest firefox and thunderbird.
Understand the "domain" comment toward XPPro sort of. Had not considered Media
Center because I do not think any of the 3 will be heavy into things video. Have I
missed something here? I just thought XPPro had the widest feature set for the Nephew's
college work, other Nephew's high school work, and Mom's volunteer stuff.
Media center gives you some of the abilities of XP Pro, but is cheaper.
I might even go with XP Home in this case, but file system security
levels are quite limited in XP Home.
Am I correct that Office Pro includes Access, and Office non-Pro does NOT
include Access?
But other than this, Office non-Pro still includes Work, Excel, PowerPoint. Silly question, I
suppose, I can search this out myself. :)
Well, if you are going OEM you have a lot of choices:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/howtobuy/compare.mspx
Basic: Word/Excel/Outlook
SBE: Word/Excel/Outlook/PowerPoint/Publisher
Pro: Word/Excel/Outlook/PowerPoint/Publisher/Access
NewEgg prices:
Basic: $165
SBE: $240
Pro: $308
Student and Teacher Retail: Word/Excel/Outlook/PowerPoint
NewEgg: $135
You may have to prove that you are buying this for a student, and the
use of the software for anything buisness or corporate related may
invalidate the license.
I'd like to install XP with an admin desktop and 3 non-admin user desktops. This may not fly
because younger Nephew likes to surf and download stuff. Hmm. More human engineering!
LOL!
I was questioned about web browsers. I do detect a less than warm feeling about the
default IE browser. I will reccommend FireFox, but I suspect the family will wish to stay
with their Netscape browser. This will be the most contenscious issue I suspect.
Thanks for all your comments and discussion. I had no idea there were such stong feelings
about office suites. For the record, for the 33 years I did with Xerox, I was required to use
any/all MS office suites from my start with CPM up thru WinNT4. Yes, it was due to
corporate support agreements with MS, but all office suites were taught on company time
and my proficiency wth the big4 of office was expected to be maintained. I was in an
engineering dicipline and I did spend a 10 year stint producing service literature. Our
external type-setting/printing vendor preferred MS also, but was fluent in most other
office suites of the time. As it has been ~40 years since I was in higher education, I freely
admit being clueless to what/how higher education is dealing with the explosion of the pc.
I do not feel like I am a MS toady, but I am most familiar with many of their
products.
While I tend to dislike dealing with MS products (buggy, bloated, PIA,
etc), I deal with them every day.
Heck, I am covered by an enterprise agreement at work, that would permit
me to run Windows 2003 server on all systems at no cost to my office.
Do we? No! We run Linux on most of our servers, including our new
8.5TB usable RAID6 setups.
Do we do this because we hate MS, not, we do it because WE can fix a
problem with the server, instead of waiting for MS to issue a patch. We
have the skillset in house to do this, and we are only a two person shop.
Harry
Great discussion! Thanks. I'll share some of your thoughts with Sis. Ultimately, she will make
most of the decisions.
Best,
Duncan
