In computer news this week, 05/21/2002

How stale is your software ?

I'll bet you your software is out of date, particularly if you use any Microsoft programs ....

An example of this would be the suite of Microsoft Programs, which is referred to as Microsoft Office, which includes Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and Powerpoint. There are other versions of Office - usually called Professional or Deluxe - which include Access, Publisher, and other programs. There has been an Office 95, 97, 2000 and now XP.

In each major release of a program, there are known bugs, thousands of them in some cases. Most of them you probably won't even know about, but some of them may effect your productivity, and you want to fix this problem.

Let me give you an example I encountered....

I noticed that sometimes I'd receive an email from someone and there would be an attachment that had a Microsoft Outlook Addressbook file - a .vcf file - and I could save this file directly into Outlook and then I'd have all the information on that person - their name and address, email, and other information. I thought that was a great idea and seeing as so many people use Outlook I'd like to be able to send them my Outlook addressbook file with that information. It was easy to find how to do it in Outlook - it just wouldn't work. I kept getting some cryptic error message regarding how it couldn't create the file. I also had little quirks in other programs, like Access which I use for software development.

It occurred to me that I might have stale software.

I went out to the Microsoft.com site - which is one of the slowest sites on the internet due to all the traffic, and did a search for software updates. You can go specifically to this page:

http://office.microsoft.com/ProductUpdates/default.aspx

On this office products update page, you can click on a button that will detect what programs you have on your computer, and what updates are available for them. It will take less than a minute even using a dialup modem for this process.

Then you will see screens which show what updates are available for your older software suite. In my case, I needed at least 2 versions of the updates, and there were 2 major ones for Office 2000 premium. Then comes the slow part, having to download these updates, which can take hours depending on your internet connection, and you also have to have your original CD that the programs came on to verify that you are a registered and legitimate owner of the software.

It is also possible to order a cdrom of these updates, if you want to wait weeks for delivery, but the overall installation time might be faster this way.

I actually was able to find a shortcut - an update for just Outlook 2000 without have to download the entire huge update program, and that enabled me to fix the problem I was having and send those vcf attachments to people.

But now I still wonder about other little problems I'm having in Access and other programs, and now I'm in an update window where I could take the time to download the Office 2000 updates, and install them, and then I'd have to download the updates for Windows, Explorer, and other Microsoft programs I use.

Or I could just buy Office XP and Explorer 6.0 .... but then I'd have to update those too. And every day you read about security flaws in Windows XP, Explorer and other programs, so it looks like with the internet now we're locked into continuous updates of all our programs.

Unless, of course, you decide everything is working fine for you right where you are, and you can live your life in un-updated serenity and bliss, pursuing and enjoying the myriad of other interests more enjoyable than the dull binary world of computers .

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230