I need a new computer and am wondering whether to buy a bare m/c and install XP, or to buy one with Windows 7.

I use Office 97 which works fine with XP, though no longer supported. It seems it aslo works with Vista.

Has anyone tried it with Windows 7, and if not any thoughts as to whether it is likely to work?

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I use office 97 and just bought a new laptop with windows 7. So fare I have been ubable to load 97 service pack2 because windows 7 doesn't recognize the sp1 that I installed earlier. The two service packs were required before I could get office 97 to work on vista. I get several errors trying to run Access, but I think I could clear them up, if I could get sr2 installed. Word and excell work ok. I don't use anything but these three aps, so I don't know if the others would work.

Simply, why?

I made a couple attempts to install Office 97 on 64-bit Windows 7, and the both failed because some of the DLLs could not be registered. After installing the basic Office 97 from CD, I tried to install SP1, and it failed due to DLL registration problems. So I tried to uninstall it, but that failed too. Finally I reinstalled the basic Office 97 from CD then successfully uninstalled it.

If you have 64-bit Windows 7 then you will just have to upgrade to new version of Office, or get the free open source version OpenOffice. OpenOffice doesn't have all the whistles and bells that MS Office has, but if you liked Office 97 then you should not have a problem using OpenOffice.

Well, considering access doesnt work, and the old version of outlook doesnt have much in the way of its main selling points (integration with currently supported versions of exhange poor/non-existant and it doesnt sync with PDAs), then you are basically just using Word/excel/PP 97, in which case you are better with OOO as it can open the newer formats, has around the same features as 97 for sure, and has less exploits to boot.

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