The High Price of Getting Something for Nothing nytimes.com
This one is on "free" Outlook, not that other free program. A topic mentioned in passing a few months ago here, where's Sal these days anyway? Stephen Manes waxes almost as sarcastic as some other guy around here. He just needs soothing Reggie to explain how nothing in life is free.
SR-1 also repairs one of my all-time favorite demonstrations of Microsoft's emphasis on quality, the Outlook calendar that put Thanksgiving on various Tuesdays and Wednesdays over the next few years, but never on Thursday, not even in the year 2000. Since the SR-1 fixes must be in place before you can use a forthcoming SR-2 patch, which includes another hunk of code that repairs potential errors in Excel's spreadsheets, installing SR-1 is a good idea.
Most recent versions of Office already include the SR-1 fixes, but it can be impossible to tell until you have installed the program. The clue: When you run a repaired version and click the "About" item under the Help menu, the rubric "SR-1" will appear after the program's name. Retail copies sold today should contain the updated code, but a CD with the defective version came with a new Micron computer that I tested a month ago, and other computer makers may still be shipping the unfixed version.
Things get stranger. If for some reason you need to reinstall Office 97 or one of its programs, you will need to run the patch again. Worse, if you need to install a smaller component, you will need to uninstall Office in its entirety, reinstall it, and then run the patch program. The details in all their stupefying glory are available at the hard-to-find ww.microsoft.com/office/office97/servicerelease/sr1readme.htm page.
So one expense of getting Outlook 98 for nothing is your time. Microsoft's Web site informed me that the 7-megabyte patch download would take a minimum of 35 minutes over a 28.8 kilobit-per-second modem. It actually took a lot longer. Two successive attempts to grab the file from Microsoft's own site and one in California stalled halfway through.
And so on. Just another illustration of the integrity and uniformity of the Windows experience, I guess. My next door neighbor actually uses and likes the PDA thing from the company that pulled the plug on the product because of "free" Outlook, and was annoyed at that news. I guess he'll have to experience the integrity and uniformity sooner or later, too.
Cheers, Dan. |
