Registration Woes

By Jerry Pournelle

September 6, 2004

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Office 2003 Updates

There is a new Service Pack 1 for Office 2003. I found this out when one of my Outlook plug-in programs crashed the system and I used that automatic reporting thing to tell Microsoft about it. That activates the Microsoft crash analyzer, and for once it came back with useful information, to wit that my problem was fixed by Service Pack 1 for Office 2003. It even gave me a link to that site.

Upgrading was without incident except that at one point I was asked for the installation disk. I thought I had set that machine so it kept all the installation files—I usually copy the entire installation disk to the machine and install from that—but I do have the disks, and rather than dig out the logs and see what I did, I found the disk and put it in.

I've now upgraded Office 2003 on three other machines, none of which demanded installation disks. The moral of this story is, when you install something like Office, do take the trouble to copy the whole installation disk to your hard drive, then install from there. It will save annoyances later when you do major product upgrades.

Trips with Lisabetta

My love affair with Lisabetta, my HP-Compaq TabletPC, continues unabated. Lisabetta has been the only machine I have carried with me on a number of trips as well as a week at the beach house, and she has performed splendidly.

Down at the beach I have an external monitor (very old, and about to be replaced with a 17-inch flat screen) and a Microsoft USB keyboard and Microsoft Redeye Mouse. On trips I always carry a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical for use when I am doing a lot of cutting and pasting on my web page: Using the pen as a mouse works all right, but having a real mouse is better.

Wireless communication works very well. I can generally find a wireless connection in airport lounges (I can go to most of those airline lounges, having exchanged half-million and million mile club cards for life membership), and there's usually a table.

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