vk7.org

Today I got invited into the closed beta of Microsoft Office Starter 2010. This is brand new version of Office that is expected to hit the… well, it will never hit the store shelves because it’s free. But it’s expected that you will be able to download a final release copy for free in the first half of the year 2010.

What makes Microsoft Office free?

It has an AD! Sorry for capitalization. It’s not needed here actually – the advertisement inside Word and Excel is not that bad. It’s just a sidebar that you cannot (and should not, I guess) hide or change size of. Click on a screenshot above to see how it looks.

What makes free Microsoft Office great?

It has everything average user could ever use or think it’ll be useful sometimes in a distinct future. Also, Office Starter 2010 opens and saves newest .docx Office files fluently which isn’t a surprise, but in addition to that it can open and save OpenDocuments (OpenOffice.org native file format) and export any documents to PDF through the general Save/Save As dialog window.

Both Word Starter and Excel Starter have a startup time comparable with such of OpenOffice.org 3.2 and even a little bit faster. And both of them are working pretty smooth. However, you can spot an hourglass cursor for a second every time the lower right corner banner changes.

Summing up, I can say that Microsoft managed to roll out a great tool which is finally totally competitive with OpenOffice.org and Google Docs. But I would appreciate a lot if it contains a free version of OneNote too.

…is running pretty smooth, actually.

I have installed yesterdays MS Windows 7 Release Candidate (Build 7100) on my MSI Wind U90 8.9″ atom based 512 Megs of RAM netbook. Surprizingly, it runs very good. Just a very little bit slower than Ubuntu. Startup time from turning netbook on till all the icons on the desktop show up is about 50 – 55 seconds (comparing 40 seconds for the latest Ubuntu). GUI with the simplified Windows 7 Basic theme is responsive a
nd smooth. Basic Aero features are working but slowing down the whole system a bit.

Installation is fast and simple. All the MSI Wind’s hardware working fine right out of the box without any additional drivers installation, even the built-in camera which I have failed to set up in Ubuntu. Windows 7 Ultimate – the only option during the beta test – ate seven Gigs of my HDD space. There are a lot of bundled software most of the people hardly ever need, so I think it could be cleaned up for a half a Gig easily.

Overall, Windows 7 is pretty fast, comfortable and netbook ready operating system. RC Build 7100 is quite stable so you sure can give it a try on your secondary PC.

Well, I got a new computer. And for the first time in the last five years it’s a desktop PC. I haven’t used desktops so long that I’ve almost forgot how loud they are. Though Acer Aspire M1641 definitely not the loudest one, the monotonous low pitch noise coming from the power supply unit is quite annoying.

Computer is built on the modern and powerful Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 2.5GHz processor and nVidia GeForce 9500GS 256Mb GPU which is just as powerful as GeForce 8600GT 256Mb that was in my previous laptop. 9500GS eats around 512Mb of the system’s 2Gb RAM so I think I need to add two more gigabytes of RAM to make it run smoother.

160Gb HDD from Western Digital is very fast but noisy. You needn’t see its LED indicator to say if there some read/write operations ongoing. The built-in card reader, on the other hand, is surprisingly slow. With its 800 kilobytes per second read speed any five bucks 100 in 1 USB card reader will work at least five times better.

There is a handy gadget shelf on top of the Acer M1641 case with two USB 2.0 ports and headphones/mic sockets – very nice idea.