On Tuesday 12 February 2002 07h44, Damian Counsell wrote:
These courses turned out to be very well run, carefully tested and graded Microsoft Office indoctrination classes. My mum has worked hard at them, enjoyed them immensely and made excellent progress. She has not been taught how to use a wordprocessor, but is brilliant with Word. She has no deep understanding of databases, but can do a dozen amazing things with Access before breakfast etc etc. Now she is the computer goddess at work.
I walked out of the MCSE crammer when the guy insisted that MS had invented the GUI and was the first DOS. He told me C/PM wasn't a true OS and that the mouse and windows-like environments (Apple, Amstrad et al) weren't GUIs. He did have the grace to admit that Novell was a network OS.
For her 60th birthday we (the rest of the family) want to buy her a computer so she can practise at home. A decent PC can be had for 650UKP. MS Office with all the components (I think the market-speak is "Office Pro") is at least 200UKP, more usually 250UKP, when bought with a new machine. This is, of course, a rip-off.
What do we do (legally) to avoid paying this obscene sum?
Why stick with MS? She doesn't seem to need it. I got a refund of MS licence from one small supplier when I argued loudly in the shop about pressing the "I don't accept" button but many suppliers are bound by their licence agreements to provide MS preloaded. I think my experience in this is rare indeed. My Mum is in a similar situation but didn't notice the difference except superficially when I bought her a basic system only and loaded Opera (licenced - I like it), Pegasus and Star Office Beta 6. She came to my house and used my Linux workstation without any help except to log on. My neighbour is running dual boot but hasn't loaded Win for several months now and want's me to reconfigure it a single boot only. In both cases they aren't "computer wizzes", moving mum from Wordperfect 3 was a major step, yet they are turning out normal office work with Star Office and using "save as" to take stuff in to work. The neighbour's machine is actually mission critical and they don't realise at work that he isn't MS based anymore. -- Best wishes, Derek