Southern New Jersey Overlook

In follow up to my prior reviews about Microsoft's Windows Vista and Office 2007 here are some additional thoughts...

For those running Windows 2000 (2K), there is no longer any offical development support being provided by Microsoft.  It has officially reached the end of it's life cycle.  If you have to upgrade or want to maintain access to the latest security updates and applications (Internet Explore and Windows Media), you may want to consider upgrading to Windows XP Pro (or Windows 2003 Server if needed) as XP is stable, may possibly run with minimal or no change in hardware (suggest at least 512MB RAM, possibly an additional hard drive, may also require upgrading video hardware -- test first, creating separate XP partition) and will continue to be officially supported by Microsoft until 2010. 

Most software that runs in Windows 2000, unless involving special hardware or special Windows 2K only features, will also run in Windows XP. 

By the way, it took five years after releasing Windows XP for Microsoft to release Windows Vista because Microsoft had diverted it's attention to fixing security problems with the existing Windows systems.  Now that Vista has been released, Microsoft will be attempting to stay with a regular schedule of releasing new versions every two to two-and-a-half years.  In other words, the next version after Vista is expected to be available in 2009.  This means that Windows XP will continue to be supported until after the next version of Windows.

Office 2007 runs fine in Windows XP Pro (or Windows 2003).   If you already have Office 2003 and it's doing everything you need, then there is no major incentive to upgrade.  However, if you desire the collaboration, XML standardization, user interface enhancements that Office 2007 offers, then you will also benefit from many other refinements and features.  OneNote is a useful utility that gives "sticky note" capabilities as well as a wealth of features including the ability to do screensaves, "print" to OneNote, then add comments, edits, etc. and then print hardcopy or save as file, among others. 

For those that use Frontpage, it is no longer provided as part of the Office suite.  Is has been enhanced and optimized for CSS, XML and XSLT and renamed to Microsoft Expression Web.  If you have legacy web pages developed using Frontpage or use it to cut and past HTML into blogs or other online postings, it is strongly recommended that you do not remove your current version of Frontpage and install Expression Web separately. 

For additional information see: Microsoft's Windows Vista and Office 2007
 
 
 
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