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General discussion

To Office or not to Office

Feb 10, 2010 8:45AM PST

Hey all, I hope you're all not freezing.

Anyway, I have a five year old machine so I'm thinking it's about time to upgrade even though this thing is no slouch. It's a P4 at 3.2 GHz with 2 Gs of ram and still kicks butt pretty good. I'm running XP Pro on it but I'm not sure my computer has too much to do with this problem.

Ten years ago, I bought a full legit copy of MS Office 2000. As you know, it wasn't cheap. I've been nursing that copy along for ten years but it looks like Windows 7 doesn't like it. So, on my laptop, I've been playing around with OpenOffice and I actually like it.

In Office, I use Word, Excel, and Outlook but I just noticed that OpenOffice doesn't have an email client. Or at least, not in the version I just downloaded. I can see myself dumping Office 2000 because I got my money's worth out of it and the word processor and spreadsheet program in OpenOffice seem like they will do me just fine.

So my question is, is there a specific email client that compliments or works with OpenOffice without having too much duplication of software?

I use Firefox for browsing when I use my U3 drives but I am pretty sure I'm going to stick with IE7.0 on my main machine. I just like IE and since I blocked IE8, I found IE7 to open and run a lot faster and I don't have any security issues with my particular setup. So I would need an email client that works well along side of IE and OpenOffice. I'm not certain that just picking any email client might not cause me to have a large duplication of similar software in two different directories. And I certainly don't want to pick something that might slow down due to conflicts.

So I'm hoping somebody has a little experience with a similar situation. Any ideas and suggestions are welcome, thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Re: email client
Feb 11, 2010 3:04AM PST
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Thank you
Feb 11, 2010 8:57AM PST

Thanks Kees, I've been playing with Thunderbird but I'm having some trouble with it. I'm trying to manage several email accounts, one being a Hotmail account that was forwarding to Outlook nicely but Thunderbird seems to be loosing a lot of email on me. I'm not thrilled with it so far.

I may have to break down and buy a newer version of Outlook instead of the whole Office Suite, if they still sell that.

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JUST IN CASE...
Feb 12, 2010 10:22PM PST

I might be a bit spoiled from using Office 2000 for the past ten years but I know it's outdated. So I have been playing with the open source programs as a replacement and there seem to be some good ones out there. But just in case, I thought I would look at the cost of upgrading my MS Office. I was shocked to see that the prices are so low compared to what I thought they would be considering what I paid for Office 2000.

The problem now is what version as there seems to be so many varieties. I would use Outlook, Excel, and Word extensively but all for personal, not for profit use. I would want it to be able to work on a 64bit system when I upgrade but work great on my present system as well. I am not certain what the differences are between the "Standard", the "Pro", and the "OEM" versions. Do the OEM versions have support limitations like some operating systems do?

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I should look before I ask
Feb 12, 2010 11:00PM PST

A little research tells me I would need at least the "Standard" version and it looks like the OEMs might not work if I just buy the "Upgrade" version. I wouldn't mind having just an OEM version but I can't tell for sure if I need the full version or not. I saw something that said the OEM might not be eligable for upgrade or do I have that backwards. Can I buy an OEM upgrade version since my present Office 2000 is already an OEM version?