Would you call this bloatware?

[stiltman]

I was bored so I decided to install XP and OfficeXP on a spare computer. I was really surprised at the space used by the stuff I installed.

I did my normal (not anymore) partition size of 4gb
Here's what I installed

Windows XP Pro (all service packs/updates and 400mb page file)
XP Plus! (full install)
Direct X 9
Microsoft Office XP (full installs and all the updates)
-Access
-Excel
-FrontPage
-Outlook
-PowerPoint
-Project
-Publisher
-Visio
-Word

After running disk cleanup and also deleting anything that the restore feature may have saved before I turned it off, here's what I came up with;
Drive C: Properties
Capacity - 4,194,856,960 - 3.90GB
Used - 3,170,181,120 - 2.90GB
Free - 1,024,675,840 - 977MB

I still have to install PhotoShop 7, Acrobat 6 (full), AutoCAD 2002, and pcAnywhere 10....

I don't have enough space

[Capmaster]

Bloatware. It doesn't need to be that large. A lot of it is debugging code they just left in because it was easier :P

[MeDiCo_BrUjO]

Once a while, I read an e-mail forward that said something like What are the differences between Windows and a Virus... I don't remember all of it, but in the end they were completely different. Some of the comparisons were this ones:

Viruses gets smaller and smaller - Windows Bigger and Bigger

Viruses become more efficient with every version, windows NOT

Viruses are updated constantly - Windows NOT

There were more, but I can't remember them... sorry

It was funny!

[tekkieman]

That's pretty bad. Not that this is the answer, but I have a 7yr old PII 233 laptop with a 2G drive and 64M of RAM with 98SE, Visual Studio 6, Office 2000, and other assorted apps, and still have about 900M of drive space left. Too bad the battery is shot. Needs to be plugged in all the time now. Still very usable though.

[D_Knife]

This is offtopic but tekkieman
if the notebook battery is not a Lithium Ion then just get it repacked
repacking is normally quite cheap, and you can usually get a higher battery rating

[thayne]

This is offtopic but tekkieman
if the notebook battery is not a Lithium Ion then just get it repacked
repacking is normally quite cheap, and you can usually get a higher battery rating

where do you do that? I have a 2001 Apple iBook with a dead battery, but I think it's Lithium ion...

[tekkieman]

This is offtopic but tekkieman
if the notebook battery is not a Lithium Ion then just get it repacked
repacking is normally quite cheap, and you can usually get a higher battery rating

Thanks for the tip, but it is.

[Roundabout]

Stilt,

I know what you mean. I was thinking the same thing last week, when I reformatted my 3 year old IBM Thinkpad, which has only a 6 Gig HDD. I decided to put WinXP Pro on it, and the only other programs on it right now are WinRAR, NortonSW and Nero. This is the space I have left:



Kinda sucks when the O/S takes up 50% of the room on your drive, where am I supposed to store my MP3 collection?

I'm sure "Longhorn" will be even worse when it gets released. Bloatware, thy name is Microsoft...

[offline]

I use Open Office for all my work. No bloatware and standard
install is around 165 megabytes. If I need to share with a
MS Bloatware user, I just export to a compatable format
(Office XP supported, but not binder) or run off a pdf or rtf.
Never had an issue in my 7 or so months in using it.

Now my copy of Office 2003 Developer (MS Select) 10 CD's is where it should be
- on the shelf attracting dust.

[D_Knife]

There were licensing issues that prevented third parties altering Lithium Ion battery packages - also because Li-ion usually had packaged circuts that indicated power levels left
Things may be different now - I last used a repacker about 1.5 years ago
They were great for replacing Nickel Metal hydride (sp) batteries

In Australia there are a few repackers in each major city - not sure about where you are thayne
Look up your local yellow pages or similar

[vitualis]

I actually moved from Open Office BACK to OfficeXP (originally using Office 97 which doesn't work entirely properly with Windows XP).

I found Open Office slow, a memory hog, had rendering problems and Office format compatibility to be less than satisfactory (put a few images in a Word document like a watermark and there are parsing errors).

I was really pro-OO but when I finally subcumbed and bought OfficeXP, it was like a breath of fresh air where everything just "worked" again...

Open Office still has a hell of a way to go before it can even dream of displacing MS Office as a business tool unfortunately.

Regards.

[lordsmurf]

When I added my laptop to the network, I decided it needed Norton 2003 stuff. It ate about 600MB of my 2GB drive (of which only 800MB was free at the time). I took it back off again. Let them hack me. I'd rather have open space for photo and emergency work.

All the new stuff is bloatware.

[offline]

I found Open Office slow, a memory hog, had rendering problems and Office format compatibility to be less than satisfactory (put a few images in a Word document like a watermark and there are parsing errors).

Have you updated your system profile. Saying something is
slow on a PIII 500 is not a good reference point.

OO is fast on my system. Have installed it on 000's
of boxes - few complaints. No problems with watermarks. Yes
requires a fair base of memory and is not quite as fast as
XP for basic stuff but stays steady under heavy loads where
XP eats VM gives GPF's.

While not as well rounded as Office XP or 2003, Open Office is worth a try. Most people in business need reliable results quickly. Open office
can deliver. I use it in conjunction with specialist programs as a general
office tool. No major complaints from me.


@ LordSmurf

Yes, norton 2003 is the worst bit of software ever developed.
1st thing I check for when a user has a problem.

[vitualis]

I found Open Office slow, a memory hog, had rendering problems and Office format compatibility to be less than satisfactory (put a few images in a Word document like a watermark and there are parsing errors).

Have you updated your system profile. Saying something is
slow on a PIII 500 is not a good reference point.

OO is fast on my system. Have installed it on 000's
of boxes - few complaints. No problems with watermarks. Yes
requires a fair base of memory and is not quite as fast as
XP for basic stuff but stays steady under heavy loads where
XP eats VM gives GPF's.

It still have my PIII 500 at my parents place but I regularly use my laptop which is a PIII 1000 + 256 MB RAM. At work, most of the workstations are some variant of a P4.

Quite simply, OfficeXP loads very quickly on my laptop... and I don't have it running in the background either. OpenOffice crawls if I don't have the quick launch running and even with the the quick launch running, it is still slower than OfficeXP!

I agree, OpenOffice is very stable. I've never had it crash. OfficeXP has done an anomalous wobbly on me (Word refused to load without automatically crashing) but it fixed itself with the "fix installation" function and it has been fine since then.

However, MS Office format parsing is NOT perfect and problematic. For example, the letterhead that I created for the Wollongong Hospital RMO Association (in OfficeXP) includes several background images including a watermark. This loads fine in several versions of Office including Office97. OpenOffice does not correctly parse it though.

Another problem is symbols and bulleting. MS Office documents load fine in OpenOffice, but OpenOffice create documents (even when saved in the DOC format) do not have correctly formated bullet points when opened with MS Word. Annoying.

Spreadsheets in XLS format open SLOWLY in OpenOffice. I appreciate that its not its native format but let's face it, it is a MS Office dominated world out there.

On my laptop at least, there are screen rendering glitches in OpenOffice. There do not occur in any other application that I run.

I agree that OpenOffice "can deliver". If you have "nothing" then it is a damn fine piece of software. However, from a pure productivity point of view, if you need to create documents with a word processor, use a spreadsheet and make presentations, then OfficeXP is much more efficient. It simply loads faster and works better.

Quite simply, I don't think OfficeXP (or OpenOffice) does a whole lot more than Office97 and Office97 runs quickly even on my old Pentium classic 200. On any of my PIIIs, it screams. OfficeXP is still very snappy on my "outdated" hardware. OpenOffice makes me WAIT and I don't like waiting... simply I don't think I have EVER waited for a word processing program to load (be it MS Word 5 for DOS on my old 386 or Wordstar on my XT).

Regards.

[stiltman]

@vitualis, I agree 100% Sure it's nice for freeware, but here it's just a play top for the techs. We would never roll it out to the masses, never. I have also played with Koffice and Wordperfect. None of them work as well as Office97 and OfficeXP on all the computers I have used them on.

[housepig]

None of them work as well as Office97 and OfficeXP on all the computers I have used them on.

while I agree that OO is slower than Office on the same machine, I wonder if some of the other comments are comfort / familiarity based.

I just put OO on a machine I sold, the person called me up at 11:00 the next night, asking where Word was. I told her that to get Word, she'd have to pay me enough to go and buy her a retail copy for about $200...

"Well, I *HAVE* to have Word, it's got things that I use all the time that aren't in this program!"

"Like what?"

very slowly, like I'm retarded - "Spell check."

I open OO. "Look on the left-hand side - see the 'ABC' with the big checkmark over it? That's Spellcheck."

"Why is it over there? besides, I need Word Count, I need to know how many words are in the document! This doesn't have that!"

I do a quick scan of the help file, and find it. "Go to Properties, and then the Statistics tab, there's your word count."

"BUT WORD DOES THAT WITH ONE BUTTON!!!!"

.... there's no pleasing some people ....

[Faustus]

I told her that to get Word, she'd have to pay me enough to go and buy her a retail copy for about $200...

No need, newer version of the Works Suite come with word for much less then that.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000AOWWQ/qid=1090947146/sr=8-1/ref=pd_...tware&n=507846

[housepig]

No need, newer version of the Works Suite come with word for much less then that.

well, she wanted MS Office, not just Word - she somehow thought that was included with Win98!

[vitualis]

while I agree that OO is slower than Office on the same machine, I wonder if some of the other comments are comfort / familiarity based.

I'm sure that this is partly so.

However, I contend that OO is simply not as user intuitive as OfficeXP. As I said before, I abandoned Office97 when OO came out as it doesn't work properly with WinXP.

I used OO extensively for about a year for all my word processing / spreadsheets / presentations. OO is just "clunkier" than MS Office and some simple things are not intuitive or just don't work properly. Examples... the default style settings for (heading1, 2, 3, etc.) don't look very good on OpenOffice compared to the MS Office defaults -- making them essentially useless. Also, why the fractional font point sizes?? Another example -- bullets don't work properly in terms of the font used for the bullet and hanging indents.

With MS Office, if there is a feature that I'm not sure about, the help feature is actually very useful. Help on OO is absymal.

Writing simple macros in MS Office is easy and intuitive and there is no need to code anything. At the same time, if you learn VB, you can write extremely powerful macros (two edged sword of course). I don't even know if this is available in the newest version of OO yet... and even simple keyboard shortcut remapping is not as easy in OO.

I tried my best to give OO a good chance and was enthusiastic about it for a long time. I have not regretted buying OfficeXP one iota. It is simply a much better Office suite.

The only thing I found useful with OO that MS Office doesn't have is the inbuilt PDF writer... but since I use Jaws PDF Creator, it actually doesn't make any difference.

Regards.

[sterno]

At work I am constantly amazed at how bloated, buggy, and slow the Windows XP + Office XP combination is. For the most part, Office 95 on NT4 worked better and was a whole lot smaller and faster.