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Upgrading to Office XP?
Not on Win 95 you ain't
By Andrew Thomas, 30 May 2001 15.01 BST
TUCKED AWAY in the small print - and there's a lot of small print for Office XP - lurks the following statement: "None of the Office XP suites will run on the Microsoft Windows 3.x, Microsoft Windows NT 3.5x, or Microsoft Windows 95 operating systems. If your computers are currently running one of these operating systems, you must upgrade the operating system before installing Office XP."
The recommended OS for the mega new Office package is Windows 2000, although it will run on Win98, ME and NT4 (Service Pack 6). But if you're a Luddite still using 95 or, God forbid, 3.x, it's OS upgrade time folks.
As it hardly seems worth upgrading to Win2K when Win XP is only a few months away, that'll mean hanging on till the Autumn before forking out for the new version of Office.
And if you're using 95 or, God forbid, 3.x, you probably have a really creaky old machine, so you'd better get a new one of those too. Office XP's footprint is pretty sizeable, with the entry level CPU being a 133MHz Pentium 'or higher'. Higher sounds like a good plan to us - a lot higher. Running heavyweight software like Word isn't what you might call a satisfying user experience on an underpowered machine with limited memory. Here's MS' recommendations on the memory front:
For Windows 98, Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Millennium Edition, a minimum of 32 MB of RAM for the operating system; 64 MB is recommended. In addition, you should have 8 MB of RAM for each application running simultaneously.
For Windows NT Workstation 4.0 or later with Service Pack 6, a minimum of 32 MB of RAM for the operating system; 64 MB is recommended. In addition, you should have 8 MB of RAM for each application running simultaneously.
For Windows 2000 Professional, a minimum of 64 MB of RAM for the operating system; 96 MB is recommended. In addition, you should have 8 MB of RAM for each application running simultaneously.
If you want to use the speech recognition bits of Office XP, the recommended hardware requirements increase to a Pentium 400 MHz or higher processor and 128 MB of RAM - which sounds like a more sensible minimum requirement to us.
Disk space requirements for individual components are Word, 150 MB; Excel, 140 MB; Outlook, 135 MB; PowerPoint, 115 MB; Access, 170 MB; FrontPage, 165 MB; and Publisher, 180 MB. But the good news is that due to the apps sharing a lot of common code, the whole thing only takes up 244Mb. You'll also need to allow another 4Mb of extra registry space. 285 MB of available hard-disk space is required for the default configuration of Office XP Professional with FrontPage.
And don't think you'll get away with just upgrading that ancient system unit - you may need a new monitor too - minimum screen resolution is now 800x600x256. µ
