Microsoft Phasing Out Office Starter Edition 132
nk497 writes "Microsoft has started phasing out its Office 2010 Starter edition, ahead of the arrival of Windows 8. Office Starter was included in the OEM pre-installation kit (OPK) of software sent to manufacturers, and included ad-supported versions of Word and Excel, but not Outlook or PowerPoint. That will be replaced with an Office 2010 Transition OPK, which will instead push users to download a trial of the Office suite and offer a link to buy the full version. The free Office Web Apps will also be available for users not wanting the full version."
Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're just marketing tools. Nobody actually uses them.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
actually, a lot of people use office starter, even in soho environments.. and that's microsoft's "problem", it was cutting into sales. not enough people actually *buying* their overpriced office products.
plus, some clever folks online have figured out how to install starter on any newer (vista or seven, i think) pc.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
actually, a lot of people use office starter, even in soho environments.. and that's microsoft's "problem", it was cutting into sales. not enough people actually *buying* their overpriced office products.
plus, some clever folks online have figured out how to install starter on any newer (vista or seven, i think) pc.
Overpriced? Office Home + Student costs around $99 OEM version (includes Word + Excel + Powerpoint + OneNote). That seems like a pretty reasonable price.
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Doesn't beat free, which is the point here.
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Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Home and Student, with three licenses, is usually ~100€. Around 30€ per license is a very good deal for anyone who doesn't use it for "revenue-generating activities". If you need something beyond Word, Exce, Powerpoint and OneNote, you can buy the individual program (in practice, two licenses - one for a desktop and one for a laptop/tablet).
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they really need to be worried about giving up the home users because $99 for Student is just too high.
MS Office Home and Student for Windows and OSX consistently tops the software bestseller lists at Amazon.com, Walmart.com, etc., etc., etc. The price of the Home edition has never been an obstacle to sales.
OneNote is one of the overlooked gems in recent versions of Microsoft Office. OneNote makes it simple to take notes and keep track of everything with integrated search, and offers more features than its popular competitor Evernote. One way it is better is its high quality optical character recognition (OCR) engine. One of Evernote's most popular features is that you can search for anything, including text in an image, and you can easily find it. OneNote takes this further, and instantly OCRs any text in images you add. Then, you can use this text easily and copy it from the image.
OCR anything with OneNote 2007 and 2010 [howtogeek.com]
Most buy the three-seat version of Office Home, retail boxed.
Office University Edition is $99 at Walmart,com (Word. Excel. Publisher. OneNote. Outlook. Publisher. Access.) Student ID required.
If you use Office at work the chances are quite good that MS Office P
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MS Office Home and Student for Windows and OSX consistently tops the software bestseller lists at Amazon.com, Walmart.com, etc., etc., etc. The price of the Home edition has never been an obstacle to sales.
You don't know that, because you don't know how many people didn't buy it because of the high price. For all we know, if they cut the price in half, four times as many people might buy it. Yes, it might be a bestseller, but it's also something that most people with a computer think they need to have, ev
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For the students for which $99 is too much to pay, Microsoft maintains their mindshare through pirated versions...
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Office Home + Student costs around $99 OEM version (includes Word + Excel + Powerpoint + OneNote). That seems like a pretty reasonable price.
You're used to it seemingly :-( Software took another turn recently... The new Mac OS Mountain Lion costs $20 [engadget.com] for instance.
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
(1) Includes revenue from iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Pro sales.
(2) Includes revenue from MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro sales.
(3) Includes revenue from iPod sales.
(4) Includes revenue from sales from the iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore in addition to sales of iPod services and Apple-branded and third-party iPod accessories.
(5) Includes revenue from sales of iPhone, iPhone services, and Apple-branded and third-party iPhone accessories.
(6) Includes revenue from sales of iPad, iPad services, and Apple-branded and third-party iPad accessories.
(7) Includes revenue from sales of displays, networking product, and other hardware.
(8) Includes revenue from sales of Apple-branded and third-party Mac software, and services.
(9) Includes amortization of related revenue deferred for non-software services and embedded software upgrade rights.
Apple makes almost as much money in iPod (2.5) hardware than they make in Apps, Media, and software sales (2.0+ 0.8) combined. The iTunes revenue also includes iPod accessories as well. And any revenue from the App or Media or Mac App store to Apple is only 30% of reported revenue as they have to give the original content owner their 70% cut first. Bottom line: Apple makes most of their money from hardware. This isn't hard to look up.
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Software took another turn recently... The new Mac OS Mountain Lion costs $20 for instance.
And for a more appropriate comparison than an upgrade of a 12 month old version of an OS, iWork costs $79 [apple.com].
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
Or $20 each for the individual apps on the App Store...
Which seems better, because many people I know would use one or two, but not all three...
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It's not wether msoffice is worth $99 as a whole, it's wether it offers $99 of benefit over and above libreoffice or the free version of office starter... Chances are that for most people it does not, making it overpriced.
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Come on guys...
I love open source, and hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but $99 is not over priced. $300,$500, and more is over priced.
Considering the features, complexity, and maturity of the product it's very hard to say it is not worth $100 if you want something nice. LibreOffice is okay, and quite usable, but there are still some things I like Office for.
The IDEs and software tools that I have are more than $99.
If you want to see something way over priced try looking at Adobe.
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For home and word processor use LibreOffice is quite sufficient.
When you need it professionally there's little that beats MS Excel and $99.- is a good investment.
A full licence for private use would be silly, both from the point of options never used and the price point.
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same here i used office 97 until i switched to OO.o/LO. installed and ran fine. it is one of the ms products that fallowed all of the rules and uses more or less unchanged interfaces same ironically with ms bob which i got board in windows server class and installed on windows server 03.
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As an individual, I may make a different decision; for example, there may be things that Office is better at, which I don't care about. Price wins over features I don't need.
But yeah, $99 is not really overpriced, if there's anything in that which you care about.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're not allowed to use Home and Student for part of your job.
Office Home and Business is $249 per machine.
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I love open source, and hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but $99 is not over priced.
[citation needed]
The most credible alternative costs $0. It's difficult to argue that $99 is not overpriced.
Considering the features, complexity, and maturity of the product
Features: If Libreoffice doesn't have it, that's probably because statistically no one uses it. Complexity: Seriously? How much of the complexity is due to unnecessary convolution? Maturity: Uh no. They keep changing things and then it's not mature any more.
If you want to see something way over priced try looking at Adobe.
It's a matter of supply and demand. There's no supply of competition for Adobe (GIMP gets closer all the time but the usability is still behind IM
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Yes, although anyone creating an Access app is a tool and every Access app is an abortion on a plate, Access is a "valid" reason to buy some pro edition of Office. Mostly to open legacy apps, because let's face it, you're much better off with a standards-based webapp and it's not much harder to make one what with all the CMSes out there today.
However, virtually no home user needs Access. For virtually anything the home user would do with Access, there's a superior standalone app.
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[citation needed]
The most credible alternative costs $0. It's difficult to argue that $99 is not overpriced.
Citations about my personal feelings, or that it is over priced? That's difficult to provide a citation for either way. I am not aware of any authorities on the over pricing of products that I can reference their publications or studies.
My point is you can't compare against free if you are talking about over priced. When we say over priced, we are not referring to some economics term, but the feeling that Microsoft is over charging us for something simply because they can, and that the product is not nea
Restricted license (Score:5, Informative)
You 're not allowed to do commercial things with that. Why would I need office for home use? No, I'm not a student, so what exactly do you propose to do with it?
Send a letter to my sister congratulating her with her birthday? Put all my recipes in a spreadsheet (after all, it's a database, right?). Maybe make a presentation so I can convince my girlfriend it's better to watch sports on television tonight than Jersey Shore?
Keep in mind that many companies already have a license where it's legal for their employees to run full office at home and that many charities get a "free" license from MicroSoft so their volunteers can use it. There isn't a lot of situations left where you would actually have to buy a license if you really wanted to use MS Office and not be able to do so already, or use the Starter Edition, or Libre Office. Only there the "Home" license would be required.
Oh, now I see, you want to use full blown Outlook because you like the features (I despise it with a vengeance myself). Sorry, that's not in Office Home, you need to buy the full package for that
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Outlook is a godawful email client unless you've got it talking to an Exchange server. It is just bearable with a POP server but deliberately[1] bad for IMAP.
[1] bad enough that simple incompetence can't adequately explain it.
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Most of us aren't students.
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When LibreOffice is free and does most of the same stuff, $99 sounds like a rip-off to me. I can do a lot of things with $99; why should I spend it on some office software that I rarely use?
Go to China and ask the factory workers there if USD$99 sounds like a "reasonable" price to them.
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actually, a lot of people use office starter, even in soho environments.. and that's microsoft's "problem", it was cutting into sales. not enough people actually *buying* their overpriced office products.
plus, some clever folks online have figured out how to install starter on any newer (vista or seven, i think) pc.
Yep, I used Office Starter when it came with my personal laptop, it was pre-installed. That laptop got stolen and the replacement didn't have Office Starter, I'm back to using Open Office as all I need on that laptop is to open a few .doc or .xls files and maybe do something simple like write a letter or do a personal budget. Not worth paying A$300 for an office license.
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just as long as they never start using MS Works. that is an oxymoron if i ever saw one.
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Did you mean the programs, or the employees of Microsoft?
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Libreoffice cares, that's who. This boneheaded move by Microsoft will be good for at least doubling the downloads.
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Agreed. And now I dont have to uninstall that junk prior to installing LibreOffice for friends and family.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Libreoffice cares, that's who. This boneheaded move by Microsoft will be good for at least doubling the downloads.
I use Libreoffice on my Linux laptop (Fedora 17) and actually do collaborative work with people who use Microsoft Office. Unfortunately I do have to produce xml, docx or doc files so the people who use Microsoft Office can read them which is easy for me to do. Usually most people I work with don't even know I run pure open source software and even if they see my screen think it is some professional version of Microsoft Widows which their company has not upgraded to yet. I do explain when asked but most people I work with have company laptops and are pretty much locked into a Microsoft environment.
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I'm not the parent poster but I've also been using openoffice/libreoffice on a linux laptop in a predominantly microsoft environment since ~ 2001 without any meaningful problems. Whatever authentication method ID is using for network connectivity and access to shared folders seems to be being handled perfectly gracefully by my distro (mint at the moment, following ubuntu, suse, redhat) without me knowing or caring what it is. Admittedly my employers across that time period have been large research univers
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What packages properly handle the translation from AD permissions to the Linux level of permissions?
Samba4 is what you're looking for.
Not until... (Score:2)
... LibreOffice changes it's name to something less awful than "LibreOffice" will downloads increase.
Part of the problem with many free alternatives to closed/commercial software lies in the name: Libre Office sounds like a bad knock-off and doesn't roll off the tongue as well as Open Office or even Star Office for that matter. Give it a better name and people may want to give it a try.
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No shit!
THIS is News For Nerds?
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I bought a desktop for our nursing station at work. The requirement was: "as cheap as possible" so I got them a basic HP desktop with Windows 7 and Office Starter. Add to that Windows Live Mail and Powerpoint Viewer and everything works perfectly and looks like a regular office PC.
Nursing home where I work at the moment has a extremely tight budget and the money we have goes to taking care of the patients.
Trying to get sales back? (Score:3)
Lost office sales must have convinced them to do this as a way to push people to cloud services, once they're on the cloud MS can find some way to wring cash out of them. I've seen a large number of people that just need Word and Excel use the Starter and never buy a full version, that can't be good for the earnings.
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Lost office sales must have convinced them to do this as a way to push people to cloud services, once they're on the cloud MS can find some way to wring cash out of them.......
Oooh ooh ooh.. Classic Slashdot business plan. I know this one:
Next Microsoft will be releasing Office under a GPLv3 compatible copyleft license!!!
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Lost office sales must have convinced them to do this as a way to push people to cloud services, once they're on the cloud MS can find some way to wring cash out of them.......
Oooh ooh ooh.. Classic Slashdot business plan. I know this one:
Next Microsoft will be releasing Office under a GPLv3 compatible copyleft license!!!
lets see ads pay, or charge for extra features.
But it's replaced by equally annoying crapware (Score:2)
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Worse rubbish by the sounds of it. At least Office Starter was a useful, usable piece of software. It sounds like they're replacing it with shovelware that does nothing but pester you to give it your credit card or go to some free web-app suite.
I only hope to high heaven that it's easy to uninstall (not dug in deeper than an Internet Explorer flavoured burrowing tick).
why not have works come back? (Score:2)
why not have works come back?
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Probably because whatever works would be today would be made redundant by LO.
It would just result in works being compared to LO like IE is compared to Chrome or Firefox. They would be giving people an excuse to bash MS. Plus they would loose sales to those who don't need anything more.
How useful is Office, really? (Score:3, Informative)
I have LibreOffice of course, but don't actually use it much. Word processing seems antiquated. I use text editors and browsers for my writing. Most of my writing is programs, documentation, posts, and emails, not letters. Good riddance to all those empty forms one is expected to know and follow in letter writing.
Spreadsheets are sometimes useful. But I often find programming languages more flexible for heavy duty calculation.
If I do a lecture, I work from notes and use a chalkboard or a whiteboard. One problem with a presentation is it's too static and linear. Fairly easy to skip stuff your audience already knows, but not so easy to whip up new slides on the spot for the other way around. A talk is constrained enough for a slide show, but that also makes them of limited value. Everyone has been in useless, boring meetings dominated by PowerPoint presentations.
What else do office suites do? 3rd rate database management, drawings, and...?
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What else do office suites do? 3rd rate database management, drawings, and...?
If you got a slutty secretary in that office suite, there are plenty of things that it can do.
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Yikes. Seriously? I don't even know where to start with this post.
Comment removed (Score:4)
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It's useful for medium sized mailings (merging), document revisions where multiple people work on it consecutively, working in company templates and making graphs and forecasts and such. Sure, for each of these things there is specialized software available that will do it better than the office suite. The reason why it's there and why it's so ubiquitous is that it's there and "everyone" can use it.
You start with a simple document, decide you want feature X that you haven't used before and it's there, in t
Awesome news for LibreOffice (Score:5, Informative)
If Microsoft doesn't want to cater to this audience, LibreOffice [libreoffice.org] is more than happy to step up and provide a high-quality, powerful, free (and Free) office suite.
I've installed LibreOffice on dozens of machines, and many friends of mine now rely on it for opening a variety of files that MS-Office can't (or won't) open for them. It'd be great to hear from any OEMs who are considering installing it as a part of the base package on their machines.
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I don't expect my audience or client to edit my documents.
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I don't expect my audience or client to edit my documents.
Metric shitloads of companies expect documents in doc format. This is stupid but it is also the way they do business and if you want to do business with them (including applying for a job) you will need to speak .doc.
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LibreOffice handles .doc files (both input and output) just fine, in my experience. Most of what I do with it goes out either as .doc or .pdf with no problems.
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Since even office doesn't always properly load office documents, I have a hard time believing that libreoffice will handle them all correctly.
Boring, simple documents will work fine. Anything else may be altered subtly.
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Can't claim it handles "all" .doc files correctly, because I only generate/read a tiny, tiny fraction of all that exist. But, it (and OpenOffice before it) has worked well for me, on documents ranging from simple 1-pagers to 80-page grant proposals. MS Office may render them "subtly" different, as you say, but since I'm not running both office suites side-by-side I'd be unlikely to notice. The fact that I always have the full and latest version at no cost doesn't hurt, either!
A huge amount of money is ridin
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It's not "Sometimes" in my experience, the vast majority of Word documents I receive look substantially different to their intended rendering in LibreOffice. Which I find to be a shame. I usually dare not edit them and send them back because I fear that it will ruin the layout. Happily the work-issue laptop is Windows + Office. I get my productive work done on Linux and read documents on Windows.
Since I don't really care about the layout, it doesn't bother me too much - I'm more interested in source code. T
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OEMs will pre-install LibreOffice on machines as long as LibreOffice pays them to do it. Which will never happen.
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Answering your LO questions (Score:2)
Roger
1) Open LO Writer.
2) Hit CTRL+ENTER 5 times (to add 5 pages to the document)
3) Success!
1) Open LO Writer.
2) Copy the text from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum [wikisource.org] and paste it once or twice into your document.
Your document will now be about 3-6 pages long (assuming d
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He's a fucking whiner who spent hours of time learning Microsoft crap because he blew cash on it, but wouldn't take five minutes to learn how to do those simple operations in LibreOffice, which of course are trivial. There is no helping stupid.
Few people want to buy it (Score:2)
My wife has been running open office on linux and macos for years. Recently when she needed a copy of microsoft office she reacted with incredulity when she found out that our son's laptop (which came with windows) doesn't have microsoft office.
Office Starter ISN'T "worthless garbage" (Score:4, Interesting)
Paragraphs? (Score:3, Funny)
Have you heard of them?
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Paragraphs aren't supported in the ad-ware Internet Explorer Starter that grandparent poster is using.
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Re:Office Starter ISN'T "worthless garbage" (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as "100% office compatibility"... Just 2 days ago i watched someone copy his powerpoint presentation from one dell laptop to a slightly different model because he couldn't get the external monitor port working with a projector. The results, when displayed up on a big screen were quite embarrassing, with various formatting errors cropping up. Both laptops were a similar age, both running windows 7 and msoffice 2010.
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MsOffice promises to be WYSIWYG. That is what you see on the screen is exactly what you will get when you print it. Yes, it actually belongs to that era where printing documents from MsOffice was its main use. All its foundations are laid to meet that spec. But Microsoft screwed up the implementation. Instead of making the screen master and the printer should exactly print the screen, they intermingled printer idiosyncrasi
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I seriously doubt those two laptops were configured with different printers, both belong to employees of the same company who work in the same office and in which there is only one type of printer. I can't imagine any reason why those two machines would have different printer settings.
As for implementing software to respect printer margins, i can kind of understand why word would have been written that way... But powerpoint? 99% of powerpoint users are intending to display their work on screen and will prob
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Here in Aus, the A4 / US Letter resize screws up a lot of formatting.
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But powerpoint isn't intended to be printed, primarily, although it does have a mode to print your "notes" those are not supposed to be something you distribute, but instead something you use to queue your speech, or if you forget something.
My guess would be that powerpoint uses a mixture of screen relative positioning and pixel exact positioning, which screws things up if you change the display size. Perhaps the "nearly identical machine" is a red herring, and the real problem happened when he hooked up t
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Remember? you need only 7 bit
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Oh, but wasn't it supposed to be all easy?
But powerpoint and word are supposed to be WYSIWYG, a promise, it seems, that they cannot keep reliably. Using spaces isn't the smartest thing, but it should work in a WYSIWYG environment as long as you do not change
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Re:Office Starter ISN'T "worthless garbage" (Score:4, Insightful)
That usually means the presentation was made by someone who is incompetent.
The vast majority of people who use presentation software (the entire target market for Powerpoint) are not going to be experts. It's software pretty much explicitly for people are not experts at graphic design (such as your average executive or middle manager) to put together a little visual accompaniment to a meeting they're running. If they needed to be an expert in Powerpoint in order for it to be useful, they probably wouldn't be using Powerpoint- they'd be using a proper graphic design package.
If Microsoft Office is too complicated for the masses of non-IT office workers to use properly, something has gone horribly wrong.
Re:Office Starter ISN'T "worthless garbage" (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect they're being smarter than you give them credit, actually. Did you click on the ads and buy a product? No? How many people who used Starter did actually clickthrough? I bet the Starter Edition brings in next to no revenue to Microsoft. They may not be very good at software engineering, but they are excellent at sales, and if they think that switching people to a new shareware/trialware system is going to be more profitable, then they're probably right.
Re:Office Starter ISN'T "worthless garbage" (Score:4, Insightful)
I know this post is gonna get voted down
KARMA WHORE SPOTTED.
Also, please use paragraphs as a courtesy to your readers. I can't make myself read that constipated mess.
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You'll still buy their OS, so no loss to them if they dump Starter.
If you need backup copies, torrent sites will provide.
Office Starter Edition (Score:1)
Made me download LibreOffice [libreoffice.org]
Why not pre-install LibreOffice? (Score:1)
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I don't see anything but "shitty replacement software for builtin thing" showing the AP you're currently connected to via CCX extensions (Intel, Broadcom), re-distributable WPA2 PSK profiles that are more immune to syphoning by regedit and a quick decrypt once applied (Intel), built-in multi-channel wifi survey and wifi interference measurements (Broadcom), inbuilt TDR for cable measurement and broken/crossed wire tests (Intel, Broadcom, Marvell and Realtek).
As for the shovelware? Yep. That definitely needs
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Computer Manufacturers do that because it pays them. They get money that drives the cost down of the computer so you get a better price I mean they get more money. If it bothers you that much it's called format it and do it yourself.
PS: just build the computer yourself you lazy ass, it isn't that hard. PPS: if you don't want to do that all you need is a license key, you can format it yourself and download the iso from something like this: http://lifehacker.com/5832896/download-windows7-isos-to-reinstall- [lifehacker.com]
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If it bothers you that much it's called format it and do it yourself
You lose your warranty on the software if you do that. Since it's an OEM version, MicroSoft doesn't support it, only provides updates and calls it Genuine, but you can't get a support contract on it or even call them for your "three free calls" or however much it is these days. If you buy a retail license or get a volume license as a company, then only do you get support, but only if you install that windows version. Mind you, if you decide to go that way, the hardware vendor won't support your driver probl
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I don't think there's a software warranty on a machine even with the factory load, is there?
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Well, you do need two computers depending on the problem - the one you're fixing and the one you're googling with, but yeah, basically everything comes down to
1) Google to see if any one else has had this problem and what they did
2) Someone did, do that stuff.
For drivers, it's just a matter of
1) did you download a new version that broke something? find the old version and reinstall that
2) is there a new version that fixes your problem? download and install it.
3) wait for 2 to be true, or enough time passe
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Honestly, how does it make HP any money to turn off the built-in Windows wifi manager on a new laptop and replace it with one that they've written themselves? Nobody pays them for it, and man-hours to code these things aren't free.