Office 2007 and Vista beta 2

Well, like many people out there, I obtained a copy of the latest betas from Microsoft: Office 2007, and Windows Vista.

I've been running Internet Explorer 7 beta and Windows Media Player 11 beta on my laptop for a few weeks now. I've been pretty impressed with both of them really, and I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for the launch of Vista beta 2. So I thought I'd download it, and Office 2007 while I was at it.

As I'm in the middle of writing up my fourth year thesis, I thought it would be the perfect test for an Office beta. Which, I suppose, was correct. However, I found so many annoying bugs that just made it unusable while writing my thesis, that I had to uninstall it after just two days!

In fact, considering Office 2007 beta 2 is a public release beta, I thought it was pretty unusable. It's fair to say that I had a lot more problems using it on my desktop than my laptop, and I'm not really sure why. At least part of that is probably due to the fact that I prefer to edit my thesis on my desktop (I prefer the two large monitors, the proper mouse, etc). But when you can't do simple tasks, like copying a chart out of Excel into a Word document without having both applications crash, you're onto a loser really. Some of the bugs I found in Office include:

• Copying a chart from Excel to word caused application hangs (Word, Excel)
• Mail server certificates not accepted, and no way of importing one (Outlook)
• Application crash on inserting a file or picture (Word)
• General application instability (Word, Excel, Outlook)
• RSS feeds stopped feeding after a reboot (Outlook)
  

There are more, but for now I can't remember them. Also, when I actually uninstalled Office 2007 and reinstalled office 2003 Pro, the problems persisted, so I had to re-Ghost to get back to a working system. Thank god for Symantec's Incremental Ghosts, that's all I can say!

Vista was a different story. That ran so slowly on my laptop, that I got rid of it after about half an hour. Was not impressed.

I realise this is a pretty lame first entry. I'm new to the technical blogging lark, so bear with me. In the coming weeks, months, maybe even years, I'll be writing about technical things I do with computers that I find interesting enough to share with other people.

If anyone else actually reads this, that is...