The programs of Microsoft Office 2007 are capable of reading files created by all previous versions Microsoft Office and even earlier releases. For example, Word 2007 can read .doc files created by any version of Word from 1.0 to 2003. When an Office 2007 program opens a file saved using an older Office format, it uses Compatibility Mode to correctly interpret and render the file’s contents. This excellent functionality, however, is not all that you need to make the move to Office 2007.

A great concern among possible Office 2007 adopters is the ability to share Office 2007 files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) with people who haven’t yet made the move to Office 2007. Microsoft has addressed this concern by releasing the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. Using this update, users of Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003 will be able to open, edit, and save files created using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007. It also upgrades Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 to view files saved using the new Office 2007 formats.

Even if you are not considering making the move to Office 2007 yourself, do consider the possibility that one day you may download or receive files created using Office 2007. Having already downloaded and installed this upgrade will save yourself the time of searching for this blog article telling you how to do it.

There has been a lot blogged about the apparent hardware problems with the Xbox 360. I don’t own an Xbox 360 (I’m strictly a PC gamer), but I have many friends that own and love their 360, and none of them has had more than the occasional crash (these are mostly due to software problems in the game). However, this situation finally caught my attention when the Penny Arcade guys blogged about it and linked to Microsoft Knowledge Base article 907534, indicating that Microsoft says too the problem is real.

The specific problem Xbox 360 owners are seeing is three of the lights on the Ring of Light (RoL) continually flash red indicating a hardware failure. 360 users commenting at DevLib and 1UP note that when the three RoL appears, the 360 sometimes continues to operate, it may need to cool down, or sometimes it’s a complete brick. This seems to happen with 360 boxes that have been used for only a few months, indicating if you’ve made good use of your 360 for more than six months you may never see this problem.

What should you do if your beloved 360 gives you the three-flashing-lights salute? Just like when you see and idiot light on the dashboard of your car, you can know that something has gone terribly wrong–regardless if the 360 continues to operate. The Microsoft Knowledge Base article points to a few other articles containing things to try, but with three flashing reds it’s like giving a Windows user false hope by telling them all they need to do to fix the problem is to defrag their hard drive. Instead, immediately call Microsoft and make use of your warranty (you did buy the extended warranty, didn’t you?).

Mozilla has released Mozilla Thunderbird 2, the newest version of its free and open source email, RSS, and NNTP client. Thunderbird 2 supports both POP and IMAP email servers and Google Gmail, and is an RSS News and Blog feed reader and a USENET Newsgroup reader. The new features of Thunderbird 2 include advanced folder viewing options, faster email folder searching and browsing, saving email searches for later use, creating customizable email templates, and the organization of email using text-based tags, the same tagging feature found on blogs, photo, and link-sharing Web sites. And like the Mozilla Web browser FireFox, Thunderbird supports hundreds of add-ons (plug-ins) to add many useful features.

Thunderbird is a very popular email program commonly used in place of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. Thunderbird installs and starts up quickly and has a well-organized and intuitive user interface. It includes an excellent junkmail (spam) filter and a spelling checker, both features which are sorely lacking in the aging Microsoft Outlook Express. Thunderbird also supports the ability to access Web-based email services, such as Google Gmail, without using a Web browser.

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I have a lot of inactive PCs in my house. They include several Pentium and Pentium III workstations, a dual-180MHz CPU Pentium Pro server, and even a Winbook 486 laptop (fondly known as “the brick that ate my data”). The oldest in my collection is an 80386 motherboard with 4MB of RAM that I bought “at cost” for $800US back in 1989 (retail was $1200US) from a place called Beaver Computers somewhere in Oregon. My oldest machines, a Heath/Zenith Z-89A (1983), a Radio Shack (Tandy) TRS-80 Model 1 (1984), and a Polo System I (MS-DOS) from Polo Microsystems (my first PC clone, 1985), have sadly long been scraped.

So what does this high-tech nostalgia have to do with Ubuntu? And just what is Ubuntu? Well, you know how each new release on Windows is less likely to work well on older computers? And how you actually have to pay for each copy of Windows that you install? (Wipe that smirk off your face.) Well, unlike Windows XP and Vista, Ubuntu an operating system that happily runs very well on older PC computers–and is completely free.

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Hello, World!

This is the first article of the first blog at TechExams.net. I am a moderator of several discussion forums here at TechExams.net. I hope to be blogging about many topics that the users of TechExams.net find useful. I will be drawing my blogging inspiration from forum postings made here at TechExams.net, from other tech blogs that I read, and tech PodCasts that I listen to. Some topics that I will be writing about include:

• Wireless networking and security for home and businesses
• Diagnosing Windows and PC hardware problems
• Certification news and study tips
• Self-directed online learning
• Reviews of useful hardware gadgets and software
• What’s happening in the world of Podcasting
• Programming, especially C# and VB.NET
• Anything else that strikes my fancy

Do you have a suggestion for a specific tech topic that you’d like me to research and blog on? Sign up as a TechExams.net user and send a Private Message to jdmurray and I’ll see what I can do for you.