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First, Win32 means it's for a 32-bit windows platform. It doesn't matter if it's XP, Vista, or Windows 7 as long as they are 32-bit. Check to make sure your granddaughter has 32-bit. Most likely, since it's XP, it will be 32-bit. Hardly anyone uses 64-bit XP. Second, see Comparison of Office 2007 Suites for a chart of the office suites. Basically, getting the standard version will add Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint, all great additions in my opinion, but your GD may not need them. You'd have to make the decision based on the price. Who knows, you GD may actually find Excel and Powerpoint useful, considering she's a student, I would purchase the standard version.

same here. been using it since build 7000 as main os. more stable. more responsive. faster.

Re WAIK, well, if you're a home use, like me, than it's really a waste of time to make your install unattended, in my opinion. I just don't do a whole lot of install, format, install, format, etc. to justify making an unattended. If you part of a corp. however, you might need to. Re vLite - I do remove certain unnecessary components that I don't need, like media center but you have to be careful with vLite as it's not fully "compatible" with windows 7.

there's really no need to google. Just start Windows 7 install and it takes care of the dual boot.

Definitely install it. It has security updates since SP2. It can cause problems. I would backup the system or create a restore point before installing. However, in my experience, I've not had a problem.

There's nothing else like nLite, or as good as nLite, at least. It allows you to remove components that you think are unnecessary. For example, I remove all the languages as I only use English. I also remove certain drivers, tabletpc components, dvd maker, etc. It pretty simple actually. It walks you through it. It also tells you what you shouldn't remove if you want certain features. Just give it a try and play around with it in Virtual PC. MSFN here has a section on nLite. Have you checked it out?

Actually, SP3 is cumulative and includes SP1 and SP2 as well. Hence, if I had a clean Office 2003 install without any SP's installed, then I would ONLY install SP3 and skip SP1 and SP2 - this would be a cleaner. Still cleaner would be to integrate (or "slipstream") SP3 into the Office install source, then install. Use the integrators or slipstreamers found in the pinned topics in this section. I actually prefer to do it manually. See this. And yes, you SHOULD install SP3 because it includes security updates and stability updates. There is not an SP4 yet. Haven't heard of any plans that there will be one.

Well, that's just swell news for Office 97 users!

Well, you can certainly install it with Office 97 installed. The compatibility pack does not check for the installed Office version. I have installed the compatibility pack with Office 97 and it just doesn't work. Period. Meaning, you just won't be able to open xml files with it. Give it a try in a virtual machine. I could be wrong.

Well, if you are definitely sure you won't use the calendar feature of Outlook, I'll say pass both of them and use Windows Mail Live. Windows Mail Live is an updated Outlook Express. Outlook is more of a corporate product. It has too many features if you are not going to use them. Outlook Express is a dead end program - MS will not update the security holes if there are any. Thus, I would use Windows Mail Live. Even Vista's included Windows Mail program is a dead end. Also, if per chance you do need a calendar program, Windows Mail Live includes a calendar program. I use Outlook at work because we're on an exchange server so it fits the corporate needs. But at home, I actually use the web-based Gmail since I like the very well done interface of Gmail that can't be duplicated by an email client. I do have an hotmail account which I use Windows Mail Live to check.

There's no such thing as "Best". What is the "best" depends on your goals and features you need and it doesn't come without compromises. Ghost 2003 was great! It booted from a floppy (might be bad if you don't have one), which means it loads right from DOS. Was fast. Good compression. But it's got issues with Vista. For XP, it great. Disadvantage is that you cannot put more than 1 image to same file. Each image has it's own file. This means images won't be optimized. It's a sector-by-sector imaging process. You can make Vista images, however, when you restore, you'll have to fix the boot loader. Newer versions of Ghost are not that great according to some. They use different tech to create images vs Ghost 2003. ImageX on the other hand is free with WAIK and it is also great. Slower because it's a file-based imaging process. You can put more than 1 image in the same file - the images are indexed and so they are optimized, thus saving considerable space. Imaging and restoring is a hassle, however, since you have to boot to a winpe/vistape/bartpe environment that gives you access to NTFS volumes. I don't know of any other TRUE file-based imaging programs. Some say True Image is, but not according to my experiments - I couldn't save more than one image to a file.

Well, although booting XP from VHD is out of the question right now, theoretically, Vista can be booted from VHD, although I don't know if anyone has tried it. The thing is when you create the VHD in Windows 7 setup, you have to attach it using diskpart so that it's recognized during setup. Now if you attached it in windows 7 setup, then reboot, then it gets detached automatically since it's a software-driver driven HDD, and not a physical HDD. So, no! Vista will not recognize it. Moreover, Vista's diskpart does not support attaching VHD's as far as I know. So you cannot use Vista's setup to attach a VHD and install Vista. So, the only way to boot physically boot Vista from a VHD (theoretically) is to install it in Virtual PC, then sysprep, then add the VHD boot entry, then boot from it. You will need windows 7 installed, however, because windows 7 bootmgr supports vhd boot and vista's bootmgr does not. If you check the bootmgr size, you'll see that they are different. this is only theoretical, of course, and i haven't tried it. but you can be the first!

Really?!? I thought the windows 7 taskbar would have given it away. Or even the pin list. Perhaps Aeropeek? System tray functionality? I dunno. I guess some people can miss the myriad of differences.

Multiboot is possible with multiple VHD and multiple physical and any combination thereof, as long as the OS supports VHD boot. Windows XP does not support VHD boot as therefore, you cannot boot XP from a VHD and no one has come up with a work-a-round yet. You can multiboot XP on physical and Windows Vista/7 on a VHD though.

You also posted in the Office section. I will delete that post there. If this needs to be moved to Office based on whether it's Office vs Vista, please do so.

see my signature on how to install windows 7 to vhd if you want to play with it.

Is there a way to specify the size of the system partition during install? I just learned that you can actually assign a drive letter to the system partition from disk management. Thus, I think if I can make the partition bigger than 100 mb, then I can actually put Windows PE on it.

Have you tried MSFN's own forum on this: Unattended Windows 7. You can even try Vista's unattended since the principles of Vista and 7 are pretty much the same: Unattended Vista

Dude! All version are available in 32-bit and 64-bit. Haven't you noticed that the beta build 7000 was available in 32-bit and 64-bit? Don't worry about it. 64-bit is here to stay and take over. As far as availability, it's anyone's guess.

My laptop has an nVidia graphics drivers. When I connect to my HDTV, I can only extend the desktop. If I try to duplicate the desktop, it won't accept. How do I get it to duplicate? I don't have a problem with my ATI radeon laptop.

I was able to recover the text by copying the word doc text to wordpad, then changing the font to arial, then copying back to word. see attached. experience_essay.doc

Comodo Firewall does not work with 7077 according to my test in Virtual PC. I get a blue screen. The last build Comodo worked with was 7057. After that, it seems MS went on a tangent with the security "kernel" (correct terminology?). Only hope is for Comodo to updates it's firewall to make it compatible with Windows 7.

is hp's recovery environment a windows pe env? if so, you can probably use bcdedit to add it as a boot entry in the boot menu.

I'm using Ultimate and below is a screenshot of file and printer sharing. I want to keep "password protected sharing" on, obviously for the files, but I cannot disable it alone for the printer.

Ok, the status says Printer sharing is enabled but password required. There is no option to bypass password. My only options are turn sharing on or off. Any idea how to disable password required just for printer and not files.