Kathy,

couple of things:

1) Dell has a really good refurb area where you can buy new computers, or scratch and dent or refurb with nice warranties at better prices often than new computers. This is an FYI. My current laptop I got from such an area and this laptop was brand new, never booted up and it is a much better computer (more RAM, more features) than I could have afforded to buy from the brand new area.

2) I have mixed feelings about recommending which direction you should go: vista or xp. I don't regret getting vista on this laptop, but one of the things I weighed was how long I typically keep laptops. I use the laptop an awful lot. It gets more wear and tear than my car does if I consider how many hours a day I'm on it and the kinds of things I want it to do. So I typically am ready for a new laptop after about 2 years, 3 years at the most. So I think vista was a good choice to take me into that future period of time.

When it comes down to it, there are two things that bother me about Vista vs. XP. Everything else is liveable and/or a perhaps improvement over XP.

1) Office 2007 files don't play nice with previous Office so I have to save everything as 03 files so I can share the files.

2) I had this horrible memory problem that was a function of Vista's auto backup. The backup ate up nearly all the space on my hard disk and I had to run several searches on google to figure out what the problem was.

I must admit, I don't see real performance problems between Vista and XP. My XP laptop was not lightning fast, so I think my current laptop is much faster than my XP one.

Probably because your current laptop has much better hardware. I mean the only reasonable speed comparison between varying OS systems is the same hardware.

Oh I think you are right. It also has a lot more RAM.

I have Vista and haven't had a problem with it so far, but I'm hardly putting the laptop through its paces.

My feeling on this is: sure Vista has to work for somebody. I guess it is a matter of how lucky you feel.

With Vista there is a whole lot more that can go wrong than with XP. And for this risk you getter slower performance than you would with same hardware on XP. And while I can think of a few things it does better than XP I can't think of any major things it does better.

I just installed OpenOffice on my MacBook, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to delete notes from a document I was working on in Word. Any suggestions?

I've been a fan of OpenOffice, but hadn't really used it much for my collaborative work on my old computer. So far, I'm finding that I don't like the collaborative tools as well in OpenOffice, but I'm not sure if it's because it's not as good for that or that I just haven't set it up properly. Any ideas?

Thanks much for any help!

OK - my version of Open Office (on XP) could not even find the comments I created in word. While the "Notes" feature of OO is the equivalent of the "comments" feature in MS office, I simply cannot find any of the Word Comments when I open the document in OO. Can you see your word created comments in your version of OO? Because if you can, they should have a physical location in your document (as a yellow rectangle) and you can simply find them and delete. As I said, I could not find the buggers.

Thanks Typo. I can find the yellow rectangles, but I haven't been able to delete them. Even when I open them, they just give me the option to edit, but not delete. Argh. And I can't find anything in OO help under deleting or notes.

OK I found a trick that works some of the time. If I insert a note in OO, then exit the note, then go back,select and edit it, I can use the arrow keys inside the edit box to navigate to some of the MS Word comments. Others still don't show up. I think there are incompatibilies between OO notes and MS word comments, though they probably vary with Word and office versions. Since your version is in a differing OS than I have, I can't get you much info via experimentation.