Windows Vista & Microsoft Office 2003

[Sidekick]

Okay so I'm in the process of replacing my Laptop and was wanting to know if Windows Vista is compatible with Office 2003 (small Business version).

I'd rather not have to buy Office 2007, I'm already looking at about £500 for the laptop & I've got the disks for 2003 Office sitting around at home in my name so I figure I'll just use those.

Anyone know if that's doable or not?

I'm hardly technology savy and the all the microsoft websites are full of jargon and super hard to navigate...

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Shouldn't be any problem. I ran 2003 under Vista beta and had no issues. But unless you are getting a really powerful laptop, I wouldn't get Vista. Stick with XP for now. Vista really wants 2GB of RAM to be happy, and I'm still seeing some nasty power management issues.

 

[Sidekick]

All Dell Laptops come with Vista now. Can't really avoid it.

The laptops only got 1GB of RAM. Is that going to be an issue? ([edit]It'd be Vista Home Premium edition if that makes a difference[/edit])

 

[GlassJaw]

All Dell Laptops come with Vista now. Can't really avoid it.

Dell laptop + Vista? Yikes. That's like the worst of both worlds.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

All Dell Laptops...

Well, there's your problem

If you can afford it, get 2. Laptop hard drives tend to be a lot slower than desktop drives, so the impact of low memory (which causes churning on the swap file) is exacerbated. If you've got a 7200rpm drive (as opposed to the 5400 or 4500s that are common in laptops), it won't be so bad.

If all you're going to do is fire it up, check email, do a little browsing, it won't be a big problem. But if it's going to be a primary machine where you want to play games, do work, etc., you'll be happier in the long run.

The sweet spot for XP was 1GB; that's the point where you really didn't notice any appreciable slowdowns during common use. For Vista, it seems to be around 1.5GB, but that
's a hard configuration to achieve with paired DIMMs.

At the least, I'd try to make sure that the memory could be easily upgradeable later -- ie, if it's only got two memory slots, you'd be better off with 1 1GB DIMM that you could expand later, rather than 2x512 (like mine) where you'd end up throwing one away later on.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Dell laptop + Vista? Yikes. That's like the worst of both worlds.

Heh. Far as I'm concerned, if it ain't a Thinkpad, it's crap! (typed in Scottish accent, of course ) But my biases are freely admitted.

 

[IronWolf]

All Dell Laptops come with Vista now. Can't really avoid it.

Sure they come without Vista. Their Open Source N-Series come without Windows installed.

 

[silvermane]

The sweet spot for XP was 1GB; that's the point where you really didn't notice any appreciable slowdowns during common use.

I disagree. I have 512 MB and can't think of any apps that would cause massive slowdown, unless they're 1) graphic intensive (3D games - which I don't play), 2) using large databases (but there are other issues like disk defragmentation or poorly written interface).

 

[EricNoah]

I have Vista and Office 2003 on two computers and haven't had any problem with that combo.

Vista plus old laptop/old video card ... that's been more of an issue. But still usable, just not quite perfect. Nothing to do with Office 2003 though.

 

[drothgery]

I disagree. I have 512 MB and can't think of any apps that would cause massive slowdown, unless they're 1) graphic intensive (3D games - which I don't play), 2) using large databases (but there are other issues like disk defragmentation or poorly written interface).

I upgraded my old Pentium 4 desktop (which ran XP) from 512MB to 1.5 GB because Visual Studio 2005 crawled with 512 MB. It helped a lot with that, but I still got the Core 2 Duo notebook with 2 GB of RAM (and a 7200 RPM hard drive and a non-integrated graphics card -- not great, but good enough for Aero Glass) last fall, and put Vista on it as soon as I got my MSDN DVDs of RTM...