Replies

OK!

Using the URL you supplied, I downloaded the Open Office programme. It took nearly 7 hours, but it went smoothly. What a clever wee device download manager is! Had to reconnect three times during the download, but it all kept going very nicely.

I’ll bung the whole thing on a disk and we’ll see if it’ll run OK on her old computer.

Fingers crossed!

Thanks again Sinjin!

Jimmy

Brilliant! Screenshots! What a guy!

OK,OK. Bit dumb here, but how did you get the URL in order to type it into the appropriate space, or do you have some automatic way of doing it. Step by step in plain English please.

Thanks again,

Jimmy

Thanks Sinjin. I’d like to know how you know this. I kinda guessed it’d be something like that, but there must be a way of knowing for sure!

I’ll try it tonight.

Jimmy

HELP!!!

Got the Free Download Manager and can’t work out how to use it! It says, just type in the URL of the file. ?????? What is it? The URL of the download site plus the file name? I have no idea….I’m sure it’s simple enough, but I.m lost….

Jimmy

I got a download manager last night and will have a go with it tonight. I’m trying to find a way to stop my dial up from disconnecting after 2 hours…

Jimmy

Thanks again guys!

Righty ho….

Popped over to the old M.I.L’s earlier and tried copying the whole CD onto the Hard Disk. It started copying, got to 4% then froze, locking the whole computer. The CD Rom just sat there chuntering away…..had to do a reset.

Previously to all this I had uninstalled Microsoft Works to see if that would help. It didn’t…. M.I.L. needs it to do some invoicing so I needed to re-install it. No problem. It flew in!

Conclusion…..The Office 97 disk is a duffer…or at least is incompatible with the CD Rom on her computer.

I had a look at the ‘openoffice’ download site, but for a dial up account a 70MB download is a bit much! I’ll look into alternative methods of getting my hands on a copy….

In the meantime the Office 97 is going back and another one is being hunted…….fingers crossed.

Again….thanks!

Jimmy

Thanks guys!

I’ve checked the hard drive which seems OK.

It does appear that the CD Rom is struggling to read this disk, but when I tried this disk on a variety of Win98 computers at work the same thing happened. However Microsoft Works is also installed in all of those computers too! Why can’t this disk just overwrite or ignore existing similar files…..grrrr…

Jimmy

Hi again. It’s Saturday and I’m afraid none of the above ideas worked.

I first tried doing a custom install then going into the sub menu and de-selected everything except Word files. The installation went really well until 72% when it stalled. The file it was stryggling with was a vbssomething.hlp. This implies that it was still trying to insall a help file of some sort that must be tied into the Word Program files.

I then tried moving all the contents of the Shared Microsoft file into another temporary file. Same thing happened. It seems that this program will not write into the Microsoft Shared file at all, even when it is empty before the install.

My theory now is that it is a faulty disk as it continually freezes the computer at various stages of the process, and is generally, ummm, ticking me off!!!

However, this doesn’t explain why it installed perfectly on WinXP (My own computer) first time?

If anybody has any other ideas, please feel free to respond, otherwise the disk is being returned on Monday.

Thanks,

Jimmy

WOW! I.m getting all excited now! Thanks Unkamunka….keep em coming!

I’ll print all this off before I go visit her and I’ll send the winning solution a Prize! She bakes a fine bun!!

Jimmy

I’d really like to do that, but how? There is no option during the install….or is there?

Jimmy

OK, ta!

I’ll try some of these suggestions ASAP.

In the meantime, I actually suspect that unfortunately have a dicey disk.

Any more ideas????

Jimmy

Jerry,

She only wants to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint and is not interested in Outlook at all. That is why I deselected it for the custom install. Is it possible that an Outlook98 is lurking somewhere in her machine, ######ing up my install. I would be happy not to have any Outlooks at all.

Microsoft Works is installed….could that cause a problem?

Jimmy

Jerry,

Oh jings!

Right, getting out of my depth a bit here. What you’re saying is that it is possible that this installation of Windows98 may have installed Outlook98. Am I correct in saying that this is not Outlook Express? So when I’m trying to install Office97 it is trying to cover install Outlook97, causing problems! So, when I deselect Outlook for a custom install should this not then work OK?

Please be patient with me, as I would love to sort this for her.

Thanks again,

Jimmy

Unkamunka,

I tried cherry picking out everything except Word. Still froze…..

Hmmm.

Jimmy

Thanks guys for the prompt replies!

It’s not a kernel thing. It gives me no indication of what is wrong……it just stops.

It could be the date though. I’ll try that. However, I sort of expect that about a million people have installed this program on W98 and if this was the problem I’m pretty sure a million people would have heard of it! I can find nothing.

I’ll try changing the date, but I’ll not be able to try it for a few days. In the meantime…any other theories?

Thanks again.

Jimmy