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When Windows 7 was still in its infancy, could have been a late beta version, I installed Windows 7 64 bit and my first three applications refused to install. (Old, but favored, applications) I formatted and installed 32 bit Windows and remain partial to 32 bit Windows. HOWEVER, I recently, just a few weeks ago, purchased a used Windows 7 64 bit laptop and it has not failed to install any application that I attempted to install on it. (Some of the old applications that would not install on the earlier version of Windows 7 64 bit.) The only problem has been that the 64 bit laptop has been and remains to be sickeningly slow. This may, or may not, be related to the recently purchased laptop being a Home Premium level OS and all my other Windows 7 computers being either Professional or Ultimate. Just some of my personal observation to guide your decision.

A few points from a long-time Office user, but a non-professional. I have been using Office since before it was “Office”. The original Microsoft “Office” application was called Edlin and came on a 5 1/4″ floppy with the OS. I currently use Office XP (aka Office 2000 I believe) in combination with Office 2010. (Office 2007 was one of Microsoft’s biggest blunders.) Office 2003 had begun the practice of making things so complicated that it was losing it’s usefulness to a home user. This is why I have stuck with Office XP for this long. I do 95% of my Office work in this application and use Office 2010 only when XP does not accept a certain format. Even with Office 2010 I save all files, ALL FILES, in the non-x’d format (.doc, not .docx etc.) If I receive a .docx file, I convert it to a .doc before I even read it. Office 2010 performs this function. If you are proficient with Office 2003, you would be happier with that rather than any of the free office applications that claim perfect compatibility with Office – just doesn’t happen! Office 2010 in combination with Office 2003 will give you complete compatibility with office documents from way-back-when to current. If you like Office 2003, you will find yourself continuing to use that as your primary office application if you follow my recommendations here.

Lots of ground to cover here.

6. I’m still running the last version of Avira AntiVir that supported Windows 2000 for malware protection on my Win2K system, and Avira is still issuing signature and engine updates for it 32 months after Microsoft stopped supporting Win2K and 30 months after Avira’s new versions of AntiVir stopped supporting Win2K. Avast may STILL support Win2K in its newest versions (they certainly did until quite recently, anyway). If XP support follows the same pattern, your XP system should be able to remain protected for another 4 years or so, especially if you are sitting behind a hardware router that effectively makes you invisible to external probes.

That’s all that comes to mind at the moment. Good luck.

Avast is still active and is regularly updated on my Windows 2000 installation. I have seen no notifications or heard any rumors that this is expected to change in the foreseeable future. This is the most stable OS I have ever used. I believe it has only become more stable after Microsoft quit disrupting the system with “security updates”. I do still get Office XP updates on Windows 2000. Numerous antivirus and antimalware applications are still available and regularly updated for Windows XP.

One question comes to mind reading these posts. I had a Gateway computer that was sold with an included “reinstall CD” (Windows XP was sold on a CD, not DVD). This reinstall CD was not a copy of the operating system. It was a boot CD to boot your machine to access the OS on drive D if it fails to boot. Your “reinstallation DVD” is not actually a boot CD is it? Does your XP machine have a drive D on it? If it does and the reinstall DVD came with the computer, it is probably actually only a boot CD. Verify this before you find yourself disappointed in an inopportune situation and have to back up to “start” and go a different direction.

There is a very simple and inexpensive solution to what you need to accomplish that is considerably more stable and reliable than any of the solutions offered here. Keep your old computer, just the “box”, and connect the new one and the old one with a KVM switch. Unless you have space limitations where the computers would be used, this would be a very simple and reliable solution. I have been using a Windows 2000 box and, a Windows XP box for several years and added a Windows 7 box during Windows 7 beta. This setup has been totally reliable with a 4 port KVM that replaced the original 2 port switch when I added Windows 7 beta to the combination. I have a spare connection for times that I need to connect another computer without having to round up or disconnect keyboards monitors, etc.

I have Office 2010 (professional version) on 4 of my computers. I am in the process of installing Office XP and Publisher 97 on these computers to replace 2010. I find that these “old” programs actually work better for my limited “depth” of use than the newer versions. I also am making this change to get away from the miserable Microsoft Ribbon. You can “preach” Open Office, but every time I send 20 people a document written from Open Office I get 2 or 3 responses, “I could not open the file.” I never get this from a document written in any version of Office. I do ALWAYS send in .doc form. I never use any office program with an “x” on the file extension – NEVER.

Sportman4, I think you may be missing some necessary step to create your icon. I don’t use Paint, so I will describe the steps I follow to create icons using Faststone Image Viewer (a free and intuitive photo touch-up and viewing application. http://www.faststone.com). Take any picture format and crop it exactly square. This is a very important step. If the photo is not square, it will not be saved as an .ico file. Open whatever picture you want to use as your icon, crop it as you desire as long as it is square. the size is not particularly important. I have made icons out of 200×200 photos as well as 16×16. doesn’t matter what format the picture is when you crop it, but when you save it, you manually change the extension to .ico then click “save”. Now go to the folder you saved it in and your icon will be waiting there. Now go to the desktop or wherever you have your pdf shortcut located and right click on the icon. Somewhere on the window that opens up is the opportunity to “change icon”. You may have a header tab “customize” that you also have to click. When you find “change Icon, you click that when the next window opens, you select “browse” and browse to the folder you have the desired icon stored in. Double click the icon and you will have two or three times to select “OK” or “continue”. When you have run out of windows popping up, you will have a new pdf icon. Now I hope I haven’t forgotten any step in my description here. When you find the Sports Newsletter Symbol that you are desiring, do a right click and “save picture as” and you will have your picture. Just remember that windows has to tell you that the width is the same as the height to make an icon with it. Once you have your icon, Word 2010 has the capability to remove the background if it meets certain limitations. Of course other highly sophisticated and complicated applications can remove backgrounds, too. Good luck.

I remember a few years ago when dial-up was how we got on the internet I had a problem with “internet speed” and called Bell South to send a tech out to check on the problem. He connected his instruments and checked my internet speed and then he checked on a couple of online speed tests and my speed was quite within the advertised range. (Was 600 to 800KB or Kb per second good internet speed then? I forget that number.) BUT! My “data transfer speed” was like 12 to 25 KB/s (or was it Kb/s). The end of that story was that my ISP claimed that their service was normal and you cannot expect an internet download speed to transfer to your computer harddrive at that rate. The point of all of this history is to indicate that your data transfer rate is the only thing that tells you how good your internet connection/service is. BellSouth was delivering to me at the same speed that Verizon was delivering to my computer through my tethered cell phone. As soon as I switched to cable internet with a 1 MB/s (Mb/s) download speed my transfer rate jumped to 300 to 500 KB/s. In the end, internet speed means nothing to how many seconds or minutes it takes to download a given file. Transfer rate is the only measure that has concrete meaning. Why don’t authors who report on internet speed include transfer rates with internet speed when they are comparing numbers? If I have a 500 KB/s transfer rate, I can know that a 10 MB file will take 20 seconds plus a few seconds connection time to download. Can you comment on this aspect of “internet speed”?

This wiring job, aka cable management, is PROBABLY OK for a computer with sufficient airflow, but would fail inspection in a house wiring job. The neatly bundled wires and cables do not allow enough moving air to contact each component (each wire and cable) for adequate heat dissipation. Otherwise, the organization and assembly looks top shelf. I like how that case is setup.

georgelee, I don’t know if the 64 bit version of Revo is any different or not, but with the free version, all you have to do is check the bold print items and delete them. Most applications, this is a minor inconvenience. On applications like Microsoft Office that have over 5000 files that need to be checked, it gets quite time consuming and frustrating. The only salvation that you have is that every file under a bolded file name is also bolded so you don’t have to expand bolded file names.

Edit:spelling error

I am glad to see that Classic Shell is available for Windows 8. I would never have adopted Windows 7 without it. I most certainly would never adopt Windows 8 without Classic Shell or something similar. I have Windows 8 Consumer Preview downloaded, but have been waiting for something similar to Classic Shell before I would ever install. Now maybe I can try out Windows 8 and see if any of Windows 7 frustrations have been fixed.

I have Windows 8 developer preview and consumer preview downloaded but I have read so much bad stuff about it that I haven’t installed it on anything yet. I see so many make comments about how they are happy with the way Windows 7 does something and don’t like the change. Well I have to go back farther than that. I was VERY unhappy with Windows 7 until Classic Shell came along. I don’t think I will adopt Windows 8 until Classic Shell is developed for it. I don’t need a telephone interface on my computer.

Just as a word of background, I stuck with Windows Millennium on my home computer until Windows XP was in SP2 because Windows XP was so unstable, would not run older applications, was so resource hogging, etc. These are the same things that Vista was accused of. I bought a new big box store computer with Vista Home pre-installed and it truly was so “buggy” as to be un-serviceable. I just had to take the computer out of service and set it over in the corner (Eventually, I installed a pair of large harddrives and installed Windows Home Server on it and it has been performing admirably as a home server for 3-4 (?) years now. This proves to me that the Vista problem was Vista and not the hardware.) After “discarding” the Vista machine, I returned the XP machine to primary computer status. I later purchased another big box store computer with Vista Home Premium pre-installed and my experience with that computer was similar to the experience with the original Vista machine. Frequent screen freezes, programs that mysteriously refused to run when called on to open and run, many error messages which I forget the content of now, – just unacceptable “buggy” operation. This time I remained with XP as my primary OS and gave the Vista computer to a friend who soon took it out of service and “parted it out”. Strictly between XP and Vista – XP is the hands down winner. Windows 7, by the way, is nothing but Vista with lots of make-up smeared on in a much revised GUI and displays many of the same characteristics of Vista, albeit not as severely or as frequently. Now, if you want a rock solid, stable, dependable OS in spite of its alleged security flaws, you have to go back to Windows 2000. I continue to use a Windows 2000 machine for certain chores (flatbed scanner for example) because it just works and works better.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it!

The image shows why I don’t use IE, especially all the nearly blank space at the top, with only one or two items.

Why can browser and OS authors and software developers not combine everything into a single toolbar and add buttons to that one toolbar as appropriate rather than filling half the screen with unwanted and unuseful toolbars? IE9 was one small step in that direction from previous versions but was disabled (made worthless) with instability.

I must warn you that my observations and preferences are often not mainstream. I am not a member of the world of “sheeple” and I make decisions based on merits of the case and not what is hot today.

I installed IE9 Beta on a test machine and ran it for a few months without issue, enjoying the clean, uncluttered look and ease of finding settings and such. It was after RTM came along that I began getting considerable “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. Sorry for the inconvenience.” and simply freezing up requiring a computer reset to break the “deadlock”. These issues were rare in IE8 and also rare in IE9 Beta, but became frequent in IE9 RTM. I uninstalled IE9 then reinstalled it with no change in behavior. I then uninstalled IE9 long term. I will continue to remain with IE8 for a few more months and hope Microsoft can fix the bugs remaining in IE9. To its credit, IE9 does make much better use of desktop screen space and has a much cleaner, uncluttered look.

I have a gateway MX-3416 with the exact same problem. It has always tended to run hot. Lately, it started to shut down about once a day. I have blown the dust bunnies out of it on a couple of occasions as it continued to overheat and shut down. Finally, I cut 4 blocks of wood 1 1/2″ square from a 1X2 board (3/4′ thick) and placed one under each corner of the computer. This certainly did not correct the poor engineering that went into the computer design, but the increased air circulation from the additional 3/4″ between the computer and tabletop made the difference between shutting down un-announced and staying running until I say “shut down”. These blocks can be glued or taped to the bottom of the computer with double stick tape if desired.