Do we really say goodbye to DOS with XP ?

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
D:\WINDOWS>mem
655360 bytes total conventional memory
655360 bytes available to MS-DOS
625984 largest executable program size

--> isn't that that old 10 time 64k ???

This MS decision just shows that 2000 and XP are now so far from 95/98/Me that they can't make no more reliable products on all of the OS they made .... why ? Maybe they made too much OS releases, maybe they went too far in certain ways, it shows that windows is now no more compatible with windows, the winapi is a nightmare, the question is now what will happen with .NET ???
The security and stability have been improved, but they are far from linux/unix degrees, and I still see office XP crashing on 2000/XP everyday ...
Anyway using "installer 2.0", the reboot-less and patch-limited arguments to justify the deision make me laugh ...

This is just another example of MS doing whatever MS wants to do and forget about the end user. Think about it for just a minute. Take a large Enterprise that is still running Win9x on say half it's machines. They need to constantly update Office products to keep pace with the business world yet, NOW, MS is saying that before they can do that, they MUST upgrade OS's. This scenario is just plain ludicrous. IMHO...

This is not about adding lines of code to support 9x products, this is purely about MS making more $$$$$, and nothing else. If we don't write programs code that will support 9x, then the end user's have no choice but to upgrade thier OS and then upgrade the Office products.

IMHO, this is a sorry excuse for a business to use just to show a profit on the bottom line. Come on Bill Gates, lhow much money is enough before you will stop sticking it to the average Joe? I think that you have enough money already and that you can and SHOULD continue to support win 9x for a couple more years...

if a company is too cheap to upgrade to systems that run either Windows 2000 SP3 or Windows XP then they most likely are too cheap to want to upgrade their office program to a newer version either. Microsoft's decision is right to stop supporting the Windows 9X series of software, by having to make office 11 backwards compatible with a soon to be non supported OS series they would have opened themselves up for all kinds of bugs, problems, and incompatability issues.

as for your complaint, I still know of local companies in my area that are still running windows 95 and office95. I even know of a few companys that are running Windows95 and Office 4.3 the last version of Microsoft office that was made for Windows 3.1 If there is a great enough need for a company to use the newest version of an program, then they will make whatever changes they need to do to upgrade to it, otherwise they will either continue using the version they currently own, or they will switch to another program suite such as Openoffice.org or StarOffice 6.0,etc.

Don't blame Microsoft for trying to make a better program.
After the Windows ME fiasco we should pat them on the back and commend them for their efforts to make better programs.

this is just my 2 cents worth.

Lordcyber

Why do you think that Microsoft is trying to make better software? To tell the truth I don't know any really good software from Microsoft

Microsoft doesn't make perfect software, in order to do that the people who wrote the program code would have to be perfect. I don't know about you, but I have yet to ever meet a perfect person. If you don't like microsoft that's fine and dandy go download yourself a Linux Distribution, learn how to properly use it, and contribute to the Free Software movement and never purchase another microsoft or microsoft compatible program. I'm not pro Microsoft or Pro Linux, each has it's own strengths and weaknesses.

To that same end both are forever having bugs and problems whenever a new version is released, because the nature of writing program code is such that whenever you fix one problem or introduce new program code designed to do new things it tends to break other program code that was working fine until the changes were made.

Considering Office hasn't changed significantly since Office 97 I am not sure what your problem is. Office 97 can read 2000 and XP without many problems. I assume 11 will be the same.

see my comments below David. your FUD isn't worth me wasting my time typing the exact same reply again.

I am a Office BETA tester and I agree with the decision to remove Windows 9x/NT support from the product. Windows 9x is unstable, insecure and to continue supporting it would mean a worse version of Office. I personally like Windows XP especially because it crashes a lot less than Windows 9x. Windows XP includes the side by side DLL system, System Restore and Windows File Protection which also help protect the system from problems.

I agree with this decision: It's time to say goodbye to the old DOS-Win 3.1-Win9x-WinMe kernel. Unfortunately in my work I still need to support Win95 and NT 4...

I too will have to agree with your statement. Right now I have two systems running Windows XP and Windows 2000 SP2 (which is being updated to SP3). I also have a laptop running NT 4.0 SP6 and finally another machine being constructed to run either Windows 2000 SP3 or XP Professional. The Windows 9X series is very old and still are consumer based. NT is still being used in servers but 2000 for workstations. I do agree that this is the best course of action since 9X were not to be used for businesses and NT is so old. Too many people are still keeping these older systems and not moving up. With hardware so cheap out there, it's best to give it up for these new OS's. On my boxes, they are still running Office 2000 and since I have no 9X machines left, when I update the NT systems to 2000, Office 11 will go with it.

who cares... I am still using office 97 on my win98 partition and office xp on my winxp partition. programme works best on the system it was developed for. office 97 was developed for win95/98, office xp for winxp, office 11 for winxp either. so I guess it will work best on winxp any way. in any case, if you got enough money for office, you'll have enough money to buy winxp, or at least win2000. I guess you can get a second hand copy of win2000 for a couple of $

Can't see any problem with MS not supporting an earlier OS than W2K SP3 for Office 11 to run on. MAC software does this and no ones jumps up and down.
Just another excuse to kick MS!

As an analogy, 9x is a river and NT is a road. While you can create a vehicle that works on both the road and the river, it is not as efficient as one that runs on one and not the other. In contrast, Mac is like a paved road and a dirt road. It is much easier to build a single vehicle for both.

If this is enough reason for you to never use Windows, that is fine. I see it as a necessary evil to ensure that the code base tightens up.

uh...that was a stupid analogy...

i would have to agree with the comment that ME was terrible. I know a lot of people that downgraded from ME to 98SE because it was bad. ME should have never happened. And I don't think it's fair that ME customers won't be able to use Office 11, although I am happy that the code will be more stable. I wish everyone was running the NT kernel as well, but until the product has reaced the end of the lifecycle it should still have apps written for it. As for the product itself, I hope it's more of an improvement than 2K to XP was. I love OfficeXP, but the things they put in there should have been a service pack release or minor upgrade at most. It shouldn't have been a full version.

In my personal opinion: Windows 95/98/ME, etc. or any previous OS prior NT 5.0 (2000) is a bloat. Therefore, I think Office 11 developers are doing the right thing to concentrate on developing the Office Suite for a more stable OS (Win2k or WinXP). Also, why would a person still run Win98SE/ME? Some people tell me their computers are not fast enough to run 2k or XP, but come on now, computers prices are relatively low these days and hardware is cheap. Some people are just lame to even give it a thought.

And on a personal level, you dont have to be a "Microsoft supporter" to own/obtain Win2k or WinXP or + (if you know what I mean)

Thats all.

The company I work for has thousands of Windows 95 machines in use throughout the world because it is significantly cheaper to keep them in use (in certain areas) than to replace them with newer machines.

The flip side to this is that these Windows 95 computers are used in areas where nobody would even want anything higher than Office 2000. If they needed to view documents made with newer Office versions then they would just download the neccessary filter/plugin/viewer/whatever you want to call it.

While I wouldn't say that anything less than NT5 was bloat (the opposite, really, IMHO) I would agree that prices are cheap and that you can install 2K on almost any pentium/athalon based machine. Hell, the processor requirement is greater for ME (150) than for 2K (133). But I don't think that people should be penalized or not be allowed access to newer versions. And if a person wants to run a newer version of Office, they're not going to want to dish out money for a new computer as well.

Agreed. When I got my copy of ME from MS it didn't take long for me to decide to put back on 98SE. I just recently reinstalled ME and kept everything fresh and tried to maintain it using programs like Systemworks 2k2. That messed it up because when you scan using WinDoctor it deletes importants files from the computer. For some reason I couldn't wake up my computer after it powers down the monitor. Other than that Office XP runs fine and I haven't had any problems...yet. Now I just got my copy of XP Pro from MS and I can't wait to have the stability that should've been included since 98SE.

No one is forcing anyone to upgrade, it just means if they wish to run it then they will have to move up. After all, from everything I am reading office 11 will be primarily aimed at the corporate customer.

At least this information is out now and everyone will know what the requirements are.

I think Microsoft needs to admit that Windows ME was just a patched Windows 98 with a better service pack. I neevr thought that a MS operating system less than two years old would not be able to run the latest office. For people who bought into the Windows "Millenium" hype/lies they have good reason to be angry.

windowsME was just a tesing ground to see how the new 'my documents' etc... stuff worked. from that they found out it was a good idea and implented it into XP. ME was never meant to be top notch

Really? Do you have the email that Bill sent you to prove that? I'm pretty sure that Me was a real OS, and was to address real issues with previous versions of the 9x OS line. I was a beta tester for 98 and Me, and during that product cycle, did infact work on Windows Me. It was everyone's intent to make it a better OS than 95OSR2 (my favorite prior to Me), and I think that effort was well met. Windows 2000 was more stable, but less reliable when it came to driver support and games. Windows XP has since captured the crown from both of these OSs.

Windows Me was never going to be better than Whistler. It had too much against it, but it was an important step for moving customers away from the "Windows running on top of DOS" mind set they had been so familiar with. This paved the way for an acceptance of Windows XP as a consumer version of Windows; something Microsoft had been trying to do since Windows 95.

For this reason, I am a little suprised with they're decision not to support 98 or Me as a platform. Because Windows Me IS a real OS. However, if Microsoft has been trying to kill the 9x line for years now, it only makes since for them to completely drop their support of these older systems.

If you have a computer that is powerful enough to support Office 11, then it is reasonable for them to expect that it should be running a more powerful/stable OS like 2000 or XP.

GOOD! Get rid of these stupid things! The entire 9x series is rediculous, and this is my personal attack on anyone that is running one of them and has the capability of running at least NT4! Bah!

hey now they r forcing u to buy an upgrade just to get the latest office...M$'$ greed will never end...thank god for the anti-trust suit

Perhaps, but no one is forcing you to buy the latest office either. Whats wrong with Office 2000?

What's wrong with Office 2k or Office XP is that Microsoft's Office 11 will not be able to make documents that are completely viewable within previous versions. They're constantly changing their file formats to keep OpenOffice.org and StarOffice out of the box.

Also, the idea that the OS kernel is going to make the piece of software unstable is really rediculous. Unless the piece of software ties itself with the system kernel, which is horrible design, there should be no problem. Microsoft is just trying to get more desktop users to get XP and more people who run servers to get Win2k SP3. It's no real surprise, but it's angering either way.

Or, maybe they are trying to make a better file format? As I understand it, the file format is going to be XML based, and will integrate with the newer file system of Longhorn. So the move is not to force incompatibilities with other vendors, but to reduce search times, and improve interoperability.

True if it is XML based it will make it easier for others to write for it. You don't even need Office 11 to work with it's documents then. The only thing in Office that I am feed up with is the lack of layout support in MS Word - some jobs are just things that you wouldn't use Publisher or FrontPage for. A biblography for example - Word gives you hell when you try to make the indentation correct without using spaces and newlines. I would really want to be able to do tabbing in tables too. (I hate it when tables are purely used for layout... why can't it be easier!)

You can do tabs in tables. Hit the magic CTRL and TAB and voila....

That's actually very easy to do in Word. If you look at the top ruler, you will see an inverted triangle, a triangle and a square, stacked on top of each other.

By dragging the inverted triangle, you adjust the 1st line indent. Useful for indenting prose.

By dragging the triangle, you adjust the indent for the remaining lines. This is what you want to use for your bibliography.

By dragging the square, you can move the entire set of indentation parameters. This is sometimes useful in poetry or block quotes for instance.

You can also use this technique in tables, and it is the prefered way to make these type of indentations. The biggest advantage is when these indentations are tied to a style. This allows you to quickly change the look of a document by adjusting font size, indentation, etc. by just changing how that style looks. Word is very powerful once you learn how to use it effectively. The trick is not to try and force a formating as you type. Make those changes after the content is on the page, and you will save yourself a lot of headaches.

Additionally Ctrl-Enter can be useful when you want to force a carriage return, but don't want to begin a new paragraph. This allows you to type the next line as if it were still part of the previous; maintaining all the formating associated with it.

Ctrl-s***-Enter can be used to start a new page, but you are often better off using Insert, Break..., and a Next Page section break. This has the same effect, but you can then treat the document as if it was comprised of several different documents, and not just multiple pages of the same. You can then change page orientation from Portrait to Landscape for instance. Or center the text on a page vertically. This is a great trick to center the text on a title page. Insert a section break after the title text, and then you can treat the text on the title page differently.

You can do this right now with Office XP, to an extent. Most pf the office programs allow you to save as XML. The documents are then saved as semi-well formed, validated XML documents. I stress semi-well formed because I have noticed that Excel saves some of its values in scientific notation, which is not allowed in the current standard, XPath 1.0. XPath 2.0 is supposed to support is, but currently that makes using the .XML difficult to use.

Still, I have been able to use the .XML file to interperet data in my own applications, and the original content is still useable from this file. This allows the content to be as accessable as comma or tab delimeted, but still it has formating and formulas embedded.

Use CTRL-TAB to insert a tab in a table

The truth is... they want you to upgrade to XP - since you have to install Service Packs including SP1 they will force you to buy their product for all those running pirate copies. Once you install Service Pack 1 for XP it shuts down pirate updates because it compares the serial # etc to valid serial #'s as far as I know.

Since people will install Service pack 1 and have their copies stop working/updating I mean they will tend to lean towards buying a proper copy of XP.

XP isn't bad but I'm sick n tired of the crap products from Microsoft. I think Office 2000 was the last nice version of anything they did.

They need to fix the stupid LEAKS and bugs in ALL versions of Explorer - try copying a few thousand files, moving, deleting, etc... Explorer leaks memory like a sieve - your computer slows down to a crawl after this - running TaskInfo 2000 shows Explorer leaked tens of thousands of file handles pointing to junk. Also, where is the "Ignore" or "Retry" when copying files in Explorer?!?!?!?!?! It just aborts the copy anytime a file is failed from opening... instead of gracefully asking the user what to do it just pops up a box and aborts the copy. Bloated software written by greedy monopolistic company. Microsoft could do SO much... I really hope they clean up their act... selling a new version to address security issues that should never be there in the first place is dumb...

Thanks!

David Perry

I just want to put across that Windows 98,98SE,ME are still used in large organisations like schools and busniesses due to Windows 2000 and XP being more for Professionals i was going to put across that a Last office release for Windows 98,98SE,ME should be relased. I use windows xp at home but most of my friends hate windows XP cause of NT stuff there more intrested in older versions cause they are easier im just putting this accross cause micrsoft might want to reconsider a final release for office you could Call it Office 9X Final so that 9X have a chance of new feautures. Anyway i wont hog the panel... Lee....

Windows 98 easier?? You are kidding right? XP was designed to be a task oriented OS which in my mind makes things easier. Plus xp has the big advantage of being on the NT code base which gives it stability. Both of those things i just mentioned are things that windows 98 doesn't have. MS cutting support for the 9x (Crappy) Line of OS's is a great idea. Gives them a chance to concentrate testing on one kernel base instead of two ;)

Thank you all for the advice - Ctrl-Tab is a new one for me (but I should have figured it out - hmmm why did I never try?) Ctrl-Enter, and Ctrl-s***-Enter I never would have guessed - a hundred times thank-you for those. I worked with the things at the top - I really hated it tho - Word gets too smart sometimes and does things automatically that you don't want it to do - good thing it allows you to undo the action it did for you sometimes.

Yep ur right but only reason i suggested it cause most schools find it easier for pupils to run the operating system cause it has no login screen etc i know you can bypass it on winxp but what im trying to get across for some purposes Win9x is still used in schools and some businesses. I suggest you should move up to WinXP but what if people dont want to and want an easy os with no Windows NT just a plain os with no fancy pieaces just a plain os with the minmal use for Office and other Educational software. My opion anyways :)...

First of all, I am a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, so I know a little bit about Microsoft software. As for Windows ME, I agree that it is simply a waste of money and time (and in some cases, your data too). Windows 98, however, is one of the most stable operating systems made by Microsoft aside from Windows 3.1x. I like it for three reasons:

1. It's simple.

2. It doesn't have @#$%!@%^ running in the background like XP MUST have to work, and

3. It requires little overhead.

Office 11 is not able to run on Windows 98 because Microsoft made the mistake of the decade by ceasing support for win98 in June of this year ('02). Was this a business move? Of course! Many, many users are using Windows 98 as their primary Operating system, so if Microsoft ceases support for it, soon nothing will run on it. ARRRGGGHHH!!!

Excellent post!