Activate Office 2007

Good luck. I use MS apps because the company I do most of my contract work for requires it: MS Word and Excel docs that are awkward to deal with using any of the alternatives, a VPN implementation that only works with Windows, etc.

However, you can get locked in by your own choices. Imagine for a moment that Adobe implemented the same intrusive level of activation on all their applications. They own the graphic design and photo post processing market. Do you think that thousands of graphic design professionals are going to voluntarily go out of business by boycotting Adobe as a matter of principle? Not gonna happen.

I hate this stuff as much as anyone and avoid Microsoft whenever possible as a matter of both principle and practice: principle because I think they are a particularly bad corporation and practice because I think most of their products are overpriced, poor performing, and have better equivalents elsewhere. But I have no illusions that the lack of my patronage will make any difference in their behavior.

regards
Doug Dickerson

 

In short.

I am looking into this product. In short, do I have to type in an activation key each time I open an instance of office 2007 within XP?

Thanks!!

 

Perhaps you are right, but I (and you probably?) will not be held ransom to this bad behaviour exhibited by these companies : Microsoft, Symantec and many others. If they do not care about me, fine. They have seen the last of my money. I have paid for legitimate licenses for Windows XP and Office in the past but I will no longer do so.

And yes, people who have to use Adobe products have little choice so they will have to put up with this activation headache, that is if they want to stay legal. I wish them good luck, because they will need it if problems arise. And people who uses pirated Adobe products will not have this problem since cracks for the activation mechanisms can be easily found on the internet. I tried one of the Photoshop CS2 cracks myself sometime ago just to see if the crack works (I do not use Photoshop CS2 myself and I have since removed it), and it worked great.

Not to encourage piracy, but isn't it ironic that pirates do not have to suffer this problem?

I won't accept these activations as a part of life, and I will continue to encourage all people to seek other alternatives whenever possible, even though as you said it may not make any difference in these companies' behaviour. At least they won't have my money anymore.

 

Used the wired MAC address

Just want to chime in here that you want to use the wired mac address and not wireless one. I guess it's obvious after the fact. Thanks Doug!

Ben

 

Well, ironically it's actually *not* guaranteed to be unique. Most network adapters allow the user to override the default hardware address. In fact, I use this feature to allow me to set the VM's MAC address to be the same as the Boot Camp MAC address, while still having both of them different from the actual hardware address Mac OS X uses.

And for what it's worth, I used the MAC address for the wireless adapter. I would guess that which MAC address is required may vary according to how exactly Office was installed and maybe even varies randomly.

I disagree with the negative characterizations of Microsoft and their software, but I suppose that's a pointless discussion. To each his own, I guess. I have found the publisher of Parallels to be about as unhelpful a company as I've ever seen, and Mac OS X has locked up my MacBook Pro at least once a month in the four months I've owned it so far, which is far more frequent than I've ever seen Windows XP "blue-screen". Microsoft's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they don't seem any worse than any other company either. The whole software industry could use a "premium" brand to lead the way to better-performing and more-reliable software, and so far none seems to exist.

Pete