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The Rife Report May 2010 |
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Fixit Arrives; XP Age Evidence; Win7 Tidbits Shortly after the following review of Corel's Office X5 appears online, the Durham club will have a guest speaker from Microsoft at its May meeting to introduce Microsoft Office 2010, including the newest version of Word, the word-processor which, a few years ago, supplanted WordPerfect as the world's favourite in this line of computing applications.  Word is a tough act to follow, so it is nice to get my foot in the door ahead of time, if only by a few days. What follows are some reasons for using WordPerfect in the gigantic shadow now cast by Word. That is other than price - X5 is cheaper to buy. First off, WordPerfect retains a number of loyal fans (probably most in the legal profession) for its capability in handling documents. The Pleading Expert is a case in point. WordPerfect still has reveal codes for making easy fine-tuning adjustments to copy, something old-time editors like myself sorely miss when using Word. New in X5, and popular with some, is support for data import from Web services and other utilities, including an XML project designer. From what I learned online, internet sources such as the WordPerfect Universe site another truly major plus factor is stability in upgrading. Those who have moved to X5 praise it as the best upgrade thus far in this critical area. No problems with old documents or templates. With each upgrade Corel has added (and sometimes subtracted features), to try to recapture its sales position. It has retained its familiar opening interface. Besides the Web Services integration noted above, X5 has added a Reference Center and E-mail address book integration. The Mozilla application replaces the old WordPerfect Mail e-mail client and personal information manager.  Among reasons for upgrading to X5, the following list of components are ranked in order of popularity in an online survey:
Corel touts that WordPerfect X5 has been "enhanced to support Web Services, an increasingly important part of the workflow in enterprises, government departments, and legal organizations. Web Services allow users to collaborate across systems and gather information from both internal and external data sets. With Web Services integration, users can populate fields in their documents with data pulled from the Web. You can perform Web queries in WordPerfect X5." It has not been part of my normal workload. But then I'm no legal eagle.  The Center has a section on writing, spelling and grammar tools, as well as tips for creating well-written, eye-catching documents and presentations. There's even a section with help files for using macro tools and migrating macros created in older versions of WordPerfect Office. If you don't use Window's e-mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird for WordPerfect Office gives you solid open-source software to assist your e-mail efforts. It has a tabbed approach and a new set of search tools that allow users to locate specific e-mail in an instant. Visible tabs are saved when quitting the application and restored the next time Thunderbird is launched. Search has filtering, indexing and timeline tools to pinpoint a specific e-mail. It also lets you manage e-mail from Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, from the same inbox and has a fully integrated calendar. The addition of Nuance PaperPort 12 SE allows you to scan hard copies and photos to fully searchable PDFs, simplifying document management. With the PDF capabilities in X5 you can annotate PDFs, easing collaboration. Of course, by using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, PaperPort can convert scans of paper documents into WordPerfect or Word files. Scanned spreadsheets can be converted to Quattro Pro or Excel and scanned slideshows to be moved to Presentations or PowerPoint files. It is a viable addition to X5.  WordPerfect X5 gives users direct access to Microsoft SharePoint, the document management system standard for organizations where multiple people write, review, and access the same document. Updates to the WordPerfect iFilter allow you to search content in WordPerfect documents stored in a Microsoft SharePoint server with Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search. WordPerfect X5 has kept pace with Microsoft Office format changes - you can open and save documents in Open Office XML or DOCX, spreadsheet (XLSX) or presentation (PPTX) with no problems. Microsoft has yet to say what its price will be for the Microsoft Office 2010 version, but it probably will be considerably more than these Corel X5 prices:
Windows 7 comes with some useful self-healing procedures and diagnostics that predictably have added to its popularity. Anyone still using XP or Vista got left out in the cold. But Wait - as the TV sales pitchmen shout! - here comes Microsoft with the online Fixit Center, still in Beta. The application has been expanded in scope - it now can and does find and resolve issues with accuracy even in the earlier Windows operating systems. The free download which sets up Fixit is available for systems using XP SP3, XP Pro (64-bit) SP2, all versions of Vista, Win7, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2.  Once installed the Fixit client automatically downloads the latest troubleshooters from their library to your PC. The troubleshooters can "find and fix" issues immediately or "find and notify" you of the issues it detected. The "find and notify" puts you in control (which I prefer) - you decide which issues you want the troubleshooters to resolve. No matter what you choose, you are shown a report of what was performed on your PC and offered options to learn, or further investigate, the issue or perhaps submit a support request at Fixit Center Online. Fixit can also immediately run a series of tests to try out all your systems, or just ones you actually know are having trouble. Although power users may bypass some aspects, typical users should find Fixit provides easy solutions to many normal, even some unusual problems. Fixit also collates all the required information in one place, so if you do need additional support, that data is made available. The product links to the Fixit blog that has much solid problem information and solutions. Settings can be customised and records managed for previous fixes. It should be noted that you need to be running as an administrator in XP SP3 to have Fix it run in that OS. Chris Jones, corporate VP of the Windows Live Experience, said last week that: "Microsoft will be rolling out the next major release of Windows Live, referred to as Wave 4 sometime in the next few weeks to a small group of select testers." Not exactly firm information. However, what is firm is that XP is being cut off from client application support in Windows Live Wave 4 (the web services will still work, of course, but NOT as well). Microsoft says XP simply doesn't provide the same level of platform support for graphics.  And in another related development it was revealed that the methods used to make new hard drives more efficient could cause problems for XP users. It may mean any new drive bought after January 2011 could be noticeably slower to use on the operating system. John Lister reports on Infopacs that the issue involves the way hard drives are broken down into individual sectors. Until now, the standard for hard drive sectors was 512 bytes. However all drives produced after January 2011 will use sectors which are 4 kilobytes, 8 times larger than the standard 512 bytes. This should drastically increase the reliability of drives. The problem is that while Vista and Win7 were both designed with 4 K sectors in mind, XP was created long before the industry had decided 4 K would be a successor to 512 bytes. XP can work with a 4 K sector based drive, but will make an adjustment step that decreases speed of up to 10 %, a noticeable deterioration, especially with many files stored on the drive. The last week in April, Microsoft proudly announced that the Windows 7 operating system had passed the "magical 100 million sales mark." It now is installed in one of every 10 PCs in the entire world,. And that is less than a full year after its launch albeit during a recession.  If you wonder who's adopting the OS early (before SP1), outside of the usual enthusiasts, it is mostly business users. But whether they are businesses or just consumers, Vista's shortcomings have really helped Win7 sell. At this point in time, there are a few screenshots of Win7's Service Pack 1 on the internet. So far the Russian web sites involved have shown SP1 up and running and revealing patches - which most users should already have acquired through the normal Windows Update procedure. So, nothing new.  If you need further assurance, Microsoft's Win7 Team blog in discussing the coming SP1 update, says that updates is about all we can expect, other than a couple of new Remote Desktop features, that link in to the Server 2008 SP which is on a parallel track. They say that for Server 2008 R2, that SP1 will have: "two new desktop virtualisation features: Microsoft RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory." The blog adds: "SP1 includes only minor updates, among which are previous updates that are already delivered through Windows Update." Perhaps we've all been making too much of the SP1 milestone. Although in the past it did have breakthroughs. |