XP and Office 97

XP and Office 97

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I hope to upgrade my PC. Most new Pc's come pre-loaded with XP. I also run Office 97. Will XP cope with Office 97 or will I need to upgrade to XP Office?
Martin Phillips

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By yardleystar
21st Mar 2002 16:10

XP
I recently bought a machine with home XP

I had to upgrade to XP Professional to take advantage of internet sharing for a small workgroup and now have XP Pro running on a 3 PC workgroup with shared ADSL link, printer sharing and file sharing.

I also needed to run IIS for web development.

I also upgraded from Office 2000 to Office XP at the same time

The result was Word, Access and Excel are fine but Outlook XP was a disaster. My advice would be retain Outlook 2000 or migrate to Outlook Express 6. Outlook 2000 worked fine for a while but has become unstable.

The system has been running for some weeks now without problem - but please note XP may not support all scanners and AGFA has pulled out of the scanner market and will not be supporting XP with the result they won't work with XP as there are no drivers (That's why there are stacks of them going cheap in PC World!).

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By jeremybarker
21st Mar 2002 19:15

Should not be a problem
In general old application software should work fine on newer versions of operating systems.

I have come across a few exceptions to this with very old software. The problems fall into one of two categories. The first are things that don't install themselves properly on the newer operating system - in all the cases I found it is possible to bypass the problem. The second are programs that simply will not work - these are rare but in these cases you have no choice to upgrade.

The reverse scenario - running new applications on an old operating system - is the one more likely to not work. New applications often takes advantage of new features in new versions of operating systems so will not work (or not work properly) with old operating systems.

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By cbales
21st Mar 2002 22:59

Set up the computer during support hours
Martin
I have set up a new Dell notebook running Windows XP Home during this last week for a client and encountered the following problem areas -
1) Internet connection. Windows XP Home "doubles up" saved passwords (eg "ef42C" would be saved in the system as "ef42Cef42C") and password authorisation when going online will obviously fail as aresult. Do not save entered passwords - leave the password box blank and type it in each time.
2) Connecting up peripherals. Windows XP Home objected to a 3 month old Epson C60 printer and gave warning messages about damage to systems if loading was continued with. Epson's support advice was to ignore the Mirosoft warnings and continue with the loading process. The printer operates now operates fine and the system still works OK as well.

I suggest that you load software and connect up both online connections and peripherals during support hours in case unexpected difficulties arise. There were no difficulties in connecting the machine into our network to check that all facilities were working OK and testing hyperterminal to other telephone numbers worked fine as no passwords were required.

Not readily noticeable on Windows XP is the fact that there is the option to run many of the menus etc in the traditional Windows style, including the roll up menu from the start button. Screen displays are invariably in the XP new style format so you have to select the traditional style layout as positive decisions.

Many, including a number of computer engineers that I know, prefer Windows 2000 Pro instead and many manufactures will load Windows 2K Pro instead if requested. We have found Windows 2K Pro to be a very stable operating system.

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By JaneJennings
15th Mar 2002 17:20

maybe ok
Can't say for certain but I think Ive seen office 97 running on XP at one of my clients. A phone call to PCworld (or the like) would confirm.

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By AnonymousUser
15th Mar 2002 22:10

It is OK
Martin

XP came installed on my new computer, and I installed Office 97 Pro on it. Everything works perfectly fine..you should have no major problems

Steve

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By AnonymousUser
18th Mar 2002 15:29

Or...
Go for Windows 2000. We have a mix of machines running a variety of operating systems. The ones that rarely give any problems are running either Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000.

Office 97 will work fine on either of these.

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By User deleted
18th Mar 2002 19:19

No Problems
I've run Office 97 on XP Home without any problems, although I've now upgraded to Office 2000.

Lotus Smartsuite 97 has produced some warnings in Approach when run on XP but is actually fine.

I had to get Norton 2002 as 2001 won't work with XP.

XP does seem far better than many other operating systmes & eliminates the need for networking software at a later date.

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