Digital Downloads
Posted by Simon Salvin on 09. Apr 2007 on TechnologyThis week I bought a new laptop PC and was pleasantly suprised to see Microsoft Office pre-installed on the machine. Upon further investigation I realised this was infact a 60 day trial of the full suite, and if I really wasn’t interested I could install Microsoft Works from the provided CD. For those who don’t know, ‘Works’ is very basic word processing and spreadsheet package with all the advance features of office removed. This has been shipped with new PC’s for many years, in fact as far back as I can remember! I guess Microsoft are now trying to phase this out and tempt people into spending some more money. The software comes with a very clever activation tool. Connecting to the internet it gives you a 60 day activation key or serial number which you then enter into Word and it then unlocks the whole suite, within that time you can enter a purchased license key to remove the trial status.
Having previously used Office 2003 it was a natural upgrade to the new 2007 version especially now I was using Windows Vista. So I immediately trawled the internet to find a reseller to purchase a license key. The first stop was Microsofts own webshop. Remarkably Microsoft actually advises you to search around for the best value deal, and that I certainly did, as their own webshop wanted just over £200 for the basic package.
It is worth noting that if you search well enough you can tailor make your Office package, there seems to be more packages available online than what you’d find at your local store. Previously I had seen the Student & Teacher Edition which features Word, Excel & Powerpoint, retailing around £100 its the basics for most home users, it was just what I needed except for one missing program, Outlook, the big brother of Windows email program Outlook Express, which if you are using Vista, you may have noticed has been renamed to Windows Mail.
For me to get my hands on Outlook I would need to purchase this as an individual program at around £80 or move upto the next Office package ‘Small Business’ featuring more programs I just don’t use and pushing the cost even higher towards £300.
I was quite excited to see a number of other packages found online, especially the ‘Basic package’ featuring exactly what I wanted, Word, Excel & Outlook, I was however put off by Microsoft’s £200+price tag.
I didn’t need the CD’s, just a license key to activate my trial, although this was quite hard to find as most retailers wanted to send me the boxed package.
I happened to stumble across a US website providing digital downloads. After making the purchase I was provided the license key by email and a link to download the software. The package I chose was the ‘Standard’ package including all the software I needed and Powerpoint, which I didn’t, and yet the price came to just £87!!!
Unfortunately the license key didn’t unlock the pre-installed Office, but a litle time taken to uninstall, download and install the new package was well worth it.
I would highly recommend it, but do remember to back up the downloaded installation file and license key. You wouldn’t want your PC to crash without a copy on CD.
You may have noticed I haven’t provided the web address for this site, well it’s that good an offer I want to resell the product, but if you do decide you’d like to buy please contact me, you’ll still be paying a hugely discounted price!
Related posts:
