Clean Install Windows 7 from an Upgrade Disc

I was fully ready to "upgrade" from an old copy of Windows XP Professional to Windows 7 today when I found out the XP or Vista license isn't really required.

Using a Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade disc I re-formatted the Bootcamp partition on my MacBook and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7. All went well until it restarted and asked for my product key. I entered it but it refused to use the code stating that it was not "valid."

I knew it was a valid key so I called Microsoft support toll free (866-234-6020) and reached a very helpful individual working in the call center in India. He spoke English very well and was very helpful. He inquired about the circumstances and I told him all that I had done. Apparently, the product key will not work from an upgrade disc on a "clean install" without some help from Microsoft. He instructed me to remove the product key from the field and proceed without it.

Once the computer restarted again he had me run a program called msdt. You can find it by entering it in the search box in the Start Menu and pressing Enter. It asks for a passkey from the support personnel. I entered it and Windows activated and the installation was complete....no need of the XP product key. I asked about entering the XP key and he indicated it would not be needed. I asked about replicating the process later if need be and he indicated that the passkey he gave me should work if the hardware was the same. However, he said they would gladly re-issue the passkey if needed.

So, do you want to install Windows 7 on a budget? Buy the upgrade disc and call support. I'm assuming the Microsoft is just glad I paid for a disc...it couldn't be that much trouble to program in a request for the XP product key, could it?

Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint will crash if your saving path is too long

One of my clients kept having problems with Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac crashing when he was using copy/paste functions. Nothing we did seemed to fix it and we could not find any info. about the problem on the net.

After upgrading to Office 2008 we were hoping for better performance but it immediately began crashing when saving. Not every time but often. We have worked on this issue for quite awhile and finally discovered that if we moved the file that crashed to the Desktop it did not crash.

That led us to looking at the enclosing folder more carefully. We finally discovered that the path to the document was quite long, over 300 characters. If we shortened the path below 256 it would save. If not it crashed.

Mystery solved but my client (because his folder structure is huge and well thought out) has to move working documents to the Desktop then manually move them back into his archives.

I tested Apple's Pages (an older version) and Sun's OpenOffice. Neither of these programs had the issue.

One other point on Office 2008 for Home and Students. Entourage no longer supports Exchange servers. But you can run the old Entourage if you don't delete it during the 2008 install process.