Give Our Abilities Time

So I upgraded to Office 2007 Beta 2 on my home computer this weekend. I wanted to blog from Word / OneNote (the Blogger add-in for Word sucks) and I really wanted to check out the new version of OneNote. I decided I could live with some incompatibility between home and work Office suites since I basically take my work laptop home with me every day.

Here has been my experience so far:

First, I find that I only have 1GB free on my C: drive and thus not enough room to install. Besides the Program Files and WINDOWS directories, the only files of significance are those of Google Desktop. I attempt to uninstall several times (shitty uninstall program tells you to restart but then immediately the MSI thinks the program that tells you to restart failed, so it reverts back) and finally follow the instructions found here. OK, I've got 2.5GB free now.

Next, I install Office 2007 Professional Plus. The install works fine, please note that I just clicked "Upgrade" (after thinking about the ramifications of this for a bit) and it did all the work.

I launched Outlook, it complained about my GoogleDesktopSearch plugin, but launched and worked fine. I have noticed now that it throws an error when I close it. I tried to remove the plugin from Tools->Options->Other->Advanced->Add-ins like in Outlook 2003, but there is no longer any such option.

I try Word. It seems to be working fine although I was a little unclear on how to apply back the normal style after choosing something else. I want to set up the blogging thing, so I click the big Office button and choose New Blog. It asks me questions about my Blogger account and about how to deal with pictures. I'd like to upload them to Flickr but I'm not sure what I would post in there, so I click the help. MHT file, so I tell Firefox (default browser) to launch IE. It doesn't launch.

I click IE on the Quick Launch bar. It doesn't launch then, either.

Looks like the Office install fucked up IE. I only use it for my work OWA and those few things that need to be in IE Tab so it's not the end of the world. I do notice, however, that Office 2007 seems to launch it for things even though Firefox is set as my default browser.

I decide to install IE 7, figuring Office 2007 would like that much better. I run the install, and restart when requested. My computer, after I log in, sits there with my background and nothing else for 15 minutes while I type this entire blog entry up to this point. Finally I get annoyed, notice that Task Manager works, and launch Explorer. I get a task bar for a second and then it disappears. I launch cmd. Then from it I do a shutdown -r -t 1 which restarts the computer. So at least that works.

On restart, I notice that the taskbar appears briefly during startup but then immediately disappears. That's where I am now. My home computer does not log in. I am fucked. It is 2AM so I am just going to go to bed and hope this thing fixes itself overnight.

# posted by sbreck : 2:07 AM