Of Mice and Keyboards

By Jerry Pournelle

May 10, 2004

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Installing and Updating Office 2000

I still use Office 2000 on secondary machines. I only have one licensed copy, but then it doesn't run on more than a couple of machines at once (the license allows one desktop and one laptop per copy), and only one copy is in use at a time anyway. My problem is that the machines change. We are forever building up and tearing down systems here. One test of a system is its ability to run normal programs like Word and FrontPage and Excel, and to find that out we have to install the Office suite.

Then we have to update it, and by now that is a Big Deal for Office 2000: there are three Service Packs, and they are not all accumulated into the final one: You have to install earlier Service Packs before you can install the latest. Some of the other updates are security fixes, and all of them are important.

This isn't really a Big Deal if you have a high speed connection, and our Adelphia Cable Modem delivers 2 megabits/second nearly all the time. In fact, it's fast enough that while I have copies of the Office 2000 Service Packs on CD, I don't bother finding them; I just let the system work from the Microsoft Downloads Page while I do something else.

Sometimes the site is busy and it takes several tries to get through. You ask it to search for updates, and Microsoft delivers an error message that makes it look like it's your fault, with nonsense about the page being unavailable and questions about your address. The solution here is to ignore this nonsense and go back to the Office home page and keep trying. Eventually you'll squeeze your way into the queue and things will work, and you will get a list of stuff you need to download and install.

The main reason it's no big deal to update Office 2000 now is that I finally figured out how to install it in the first place.

When I set up a machine I always create a subdirectory off the root with the name of /WORK.

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