Dave-H

@Drugwash I echo what @Goodmaneuver said, please find help. I've been to your country many times, and while I know very well that it's hard for many people in Romania, it's not a third world country, and nobody should be "starving" there in the 21st century. If there is anything we can do to help, even just helping you to pay your electricity bill, please don't be afraid to say. This is a community of friends, even though we will never physically meet, and to find a fellow member in such a position is very saddening. Cheers, Dave.

An interesting thread. None of the registry entries mentioned there are present on my system at all. I did wonder whether I had actually done the registry hack and forgotten about it, but it seems not. Why I'm not seeing, and have never seen, the upgrade nag banner is a bit of a mystery! It could be because my Office 2010 installation is one of the Office Professional Plus ones you can buy very cheaply online, as mentioned in the thread regarding Office 2019. FWIW I gather that the selling of keys for those versions of Office has been declared legal in a court case, much to Microsoft's annoyance I'm sure! That would seem to be confirmed by the huge number of people selling them perfectly openly on legit sites like Amazon.

FWIW I noticed a significant performance improvement on FF 52.9 ESR when I enabled multi-process mode, especially on script-heavy sites like Facebook, which had been almost unusably slow and unresponsive before.

Strange, I've never seen that.

Ah, understood. Sorry to have muddied the waters.

I hadn't looked at Deviantart for a long time, but I just had a look in Firefox 52.9 ESR, and FWIW it still works fine there.

Thanks, I might give that a try, although I'm pretty sure that I tried it on a cleaned SoftwareDistribution folder installation before ages ago and it still didn't work.

That works brilliantly, thank you so much @jumper!

I too remember when there was an enormous price premium on laptops! It seemed to all change around the time that Windows 7 was released, all the computer shops around me suddenly had hardly any desktops on sale and it was all laptops. (Of course all those computer shops are gone now too, but that's a different story!) My issue with laptops is that they are very hard to physically upgrade. My desktop is an evolution of a machine I first bought in 1999, and it has been updated and changed a huge amount since then. In fact it's pretty much a "Trigger's Broom"* but I still consider it to be the same machine for some perverse reason! The point is that it has never been completely replaced, it's always been capable of being updated/upgraded to serve my developing needs. Contrast that with my netbook, which I keep mainly for its small size. It does at least have a conventional drive, which I've replaced with an SSD, many modern machines have solid state storage which is completely fixed and cannot be changed. It does have 4GB of memory, which is fine for the 32 bit versions of XP and 10 which I run on it (it is actually a 64 bit machine) but the processor is a 1GHz dual core piece of AMD rubbish which is like a millstone round the neck of the system and is of course completely non-upgradable. It's just about OK for what I use it for, but a machine like that will never replace a desktop as far as I'm concerned. *["Trigger's Broom", for those who may not get the reference, refers to a character called Trigger in the BBC sitcom "Only Fools and Horses". In one episode he famously declared that he had been using the same broom for many many years, although in that time it had had to have the handle and the brush individually replaced several times, the joke being that of course that meant that it wasn't actually the same broom at all!]

Don't forget that you'll also need the Office 2007 Converter if you want Office XP to read and write modern Office formats.

I guess the motherboard battery's dead, but I'm sure you know that! Can't you change it?

That's brilliant, can't wait to try it out!

The actual error when using that version of MSO.DLL and trying to run Word is - "Application popup: winword.exe - Entry Point Not Found : The procedure entry point GetFinalPathNameByHandleW could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll." That message appears again if dismissed, followed by the "operating system is not configured" message. There is no mention of EnumCalendarInfoExEx but that does look very like a function which was referenced in an earlier error.

Thanks!

IIRC the EU were looking into making memes which contain copyright images illegal, which is most of them of course! Whether this was actually implemented I don't know.

Great, glad you got it OK!

For volume control, you will probably need to use WAVEOUT.EXE. The normal interface won't work.

Oh dear! Is there any other way I can get it to you, Dropbox or something like that?

I realise we were all rudely interrupted the last few days, but did you ever get a chance to look at MSO.DLL @jumper?

It appears not, thank goodness!

Yes, I'm sure! I don't think that xper has said what the problem was. Just for information, here is where some of us have regrouped for the last few years if there is an outage on MSFN.

Just to say that xper should have re-enabled the flags for everyone now, so you should all now be able to see where people are from!

I've checked my MSFN bookmark, and it is indeed using an http link, from many years ago! I've changed it to an https link now, it will be interesting to see if I now get the same problem at the courtroom tomorrow. Using the latest Android version of Firefox on my mobile FWIW.

Doing jury service at the moment, and using my mobile phone on the courtroom's wi-fi. Surprised to find I can't access MSFN. It's the only forum I use which won't work, I was just getting a "connection reset" message. Today I suddenly got the following message - http://wired.meraki.com:8090/blocked.cgi?blocked_server=151.106.17.234:80&blocked_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.msfn.org%2Fboard%2Findex.php%3Fs%3D1ad077a3ee4d29224f13fd507e43fc29%26&blocked_categories=bc_034 MSFN seems to be considered a "games" site! 😁

No, indeed it doesn't! I guess we'll never probably know what was happening there. Sky won't have changed anything I'm sure, so I can only assume that resetting the router and forcing a reset of the connection somehow fixed it. I just hope it doesn't happen again. 🙂