software advice please

letthegoodtimesroll

I've got windows xp 2002 on my laptop and i want to get excel and powerpoint to use on it...should i just buy the 2007 microsoft home and student package (at £87-£97) and load that or is there something better i should consider ?...anybody got an informed opinion ?

carlingaddick

get a copy from a mate.. cost = £0

Leroy Ambrose

Good luck getting a 'copy' of any version of Office 2007 (or 2003 for that matter) from a mate. They use Product Activation codes which will render them useless if installed on more than one machine. Of course, there are cracked versions out there - but the vast majority of them are riddled with spyware, keyloggers, trojans and christ knows what else.

So unless you want to run the risk of a fifteen year olf Malaysian kid getting hold of your internet banking, personal password and other information, the days of just being able to snarf a CD with Office on it and re-use a prduct key from your mate are gone.

Check with your work to see what their volume license agreement (if they have one) is like. A lot of MS licensing now allows for a copy of a corporate licensed version of MS' software to be installed on a single home machine as well.

Failing that, just use Office 2000 - which is just as good and doesn't have any of the product activation shite that more recent Micro$oft products do

BDL

OpenOffice from Sun, it's free and is almost exactly the same as Office.

Leroy Ambrose

[cite]Posted By: BDL[/cite]OpenOffice from Sun, it's free and is almost exactly the same as Office.

And won't integrate with Office properly, falls over regularly, most places don't have the converters necessary for it and when they do have them the way they present data doesn't transalte correctly so everything looks shite...

Of course, if you're only using it at home and don't want to transfer files for work or owt like that, then OpenOffice is great - and, as BDL says - free!

letthegoodtimesroll

thanks guys...circumstances mean that it sounds like i might have to go down the purchasing the microsoft office and home package then...

leefender

Whisper me your email address mate and I will email you a key generator for office 2007,

Leroy Ambrose

Leefender

Want to email it to me as well so I can reverse it to confirm that it doesn't contain something else besides a keygen that may or may not work? :)

Serious point here - the vast majority of Trojans that end up on people's computers are spread by KeyGens that act as 'wrappers' for them. The usual distribution point for them is P2P programs or torrents. Beware.

leefender

Sounds good Leroy, send me your email and I will get it too you mate,