Re: upgrading a laptop with Word97 stand-alone to office suite

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"SlickRCBD" <slickrcbdnews@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Nov 7, 11:56 am, "Jeff Strickland" <crwlrj...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"SlickRCBD" <slickrcbdn...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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On Nov 6, 11:23 am, "Jeff Strickland" <crwlrj...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"SlickRCBD" <slickrcbdn...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

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I was given an old laptop some time ago that came with Word97
preinstalled, but no other office suite apps. I'm going to need
powerpoint on a laptop sometime next week. I have an old copy of
Office97 suite availaable installed on a desktop I haven't used in
years. I'd like to install it on the old laptop instead.

The laptop is running WIn98 first edition.
Will I have any problems installing the office suite if I do NOT
first
remove the existing copy of Word which has a different product key?
I've never done such an upgrade, I've always either installed fresh
or
been repairing an installation. I'd rather not lose my settings and
custom normal.dot as it took me long enough to get it right.

You shouldn't lose NORMAL.DOT. But you can copy your NORMAL.DOT out to
your
desktop or other storage location, then reinstall the Office Suite from
the
CD that you have.

Save your NORMAL.DOT to a safe location and plug the CD in and see what
happens. The current copy of Word should not be affected (your
NORMAL.DOT
should remain intact) and the other Office Suite apps should be
installed.
If your NORMAL.DOT gets creamed, you have the safe copy that you can
drag
back and overwrite the default that gets installed.

You have to have the CD to put Office 97 onto the laptop, you cannot
simply
copy the apps from the old machine and paste them into the laptop.

I have to use a CD anyways, as the laptop in question does not have a
NIC other than a built-in 56K modem. It was given to me years ago when
the former owner upgraded to broadband. I just haven't had much use
for it until recently, and then I've only been using Word. Word was in
a position that today is known as "pinned" to the Start Menu, but is
simply in the C:\WINDOWS\Start Menu folder, so I never noticed that
the other apps weren't installed until I went to make a quick & dirty
Powerpoint and hoped I'd recall how to use the '97 version instead of
2003.

I assume I can copy whatever updater I need to either a flash drive or
a CD-ROM as I can't get on the internet with this ancient laptop?

You can Save the update(s) to a thumbdrive and run them on the laptop.

I made a giant leap of faith there. I assume you have USB drives on that
old
machine. If you actually do have USB ports, youi can buy a USB-based
network
adaptor that will allow a wireless connection. I suppose you can also get
a
CAT5/USB converter that will give a wired connection to the 'net.

Will they work with Windows 98 First Edition?

<JS>
Will what work, wireless adaptors? Sorry, I really need to pay closer
atttention, nothing works with 98, 1st Edition, mostly because 98, 1st
Edition doesn't work.

If you can't support Win 2k, then you likely have USB 1.1, or some level
below the spec that is considered high speed, which means that the wireless
adaptor probably will not work. You'd need network drivers if the hardware
did work. The low speed USB ports is why your thumb drives don't work very
well, or at all.

You said that you haven't had much use for the machine until recently, but
what could possibly make the machine useful now? It hasn't been useful since
the former owner gave it away because technology had passed it by. Now it
has been several more years and technology has a funny way of not going
backwards -- the machine that was passed by years ago is surely not making a
comeback today.

</JS>




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