Rusty Duncan, Dell Fail Update

I’m leaving for the annual Rusty Duncan conference in San Antonio today. I am considering not blogging while out of town. So if you don’t here from me until Monday it’s because I’m on the riverwalk (I know it’s a horrible cliche tourist trap, but we love it)

I always enjoy RD, it’s good to see everyone and leave the office for a few days. Drop me a line if you’ll be in town.

That’s why restarting the system didn’t work
I was told that a Dell repairmen would be at my office last Friday to fix my failure of a PC. It was nice of Dell to finally send someone yesterday to replace the optical drive.

What was the major malfunction? Upon removing the cover to my PC the tech guy noted that the optical drive was not connected to the motherboard. I’m not Bill Gates, but I assume that isn’t a good thing. It’s not like Dell spent a day testing my PC before shipment. Oh wait, they did.

Open Office
I had Word 2007 ready to install, but without an optical drive that wasn’t an option. So I downloaded Open Office, a free office suite.

It took some getting used to but I grew to appreciate their word processor. I typed some motions (great) and downloaded some files from google docs (buggy). I was considering abandoning MS Office for good (I only use Word and Powerpoint anyway) until I emailed a client a motion and he couldn’t open it. If you are willing to put with some bugs and limited compatibility the OO word processor is a great choice.

I tried the powerpoint alternative (Impress) but it just crashed over and over again. Not really a feature I’m looking for in a PP program.

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