A piece in the New York Times is reporting that Microsoft is preparing to offer a three-dollar version of a bundle of common products -- Windows and Office, mainly -- in stripped-down editions. That probably means the Starter Edition of Windows and Office Home. Naturally people are skeptical -- $3 is still a lot of money in developing countries, and $3 vs. the $0 (potentially) of Linux and OpenOffice.org is stiff competition. On the other hand, the $3 might be rolled into the cost of projects undertaken generally to bring computing to people in such areas, so they might not have to pay for it out of pocket. That said, from all I've heard, Windows Starter Edition has been a dud -- $3 is about what I'd pay for something like that. (On the bright side, maybe we can see a kind of charity sponsorship for classrooms in other countries: pay $10 to give this many students that much more software. Such things already exist, I suspect, but this might help steer those normally inclined to pirate Windows away from doing so...)
Software: April 2007 Archives
Outlook 2007 is a staple application on my desktop; it's always running, and I probably get more use out of it than Word on most days. But it's also suffered periodically from a kind of stodginess that seems to be totally unrelated to machine speed, fragmentation or anything else of the kind. Many people reported similar problems, and after gathering a good deal of user data Microsoft finally released a patch (validation needed) designed to address these problems, which they claim were due to contention issues in .PST access.
Thinking I could do no worse than I already was, I downloaded it and tried it out. The change was dramatic: Outlook now starts up markedly faster, and all operations with messages -- opening, moving, deleting, previewing -- are far speedier than they used to be. If you're running O2K7, go get it.
