BCU. What the hell’s that all about. Hmm.. BCU… think…think…Got it. Basic Computer Usage. That’s the stuff I am asked about by friends when out and I’m no good at answering that stuff. The people that can’t do BCU I just can’t help coz they can barely elucidate their problem. When I have given up trying to understand their gibberish and resort to the ‘what did you do or install last?’ question I usually get the ‘I didn’t do anything’ response. At that point I lose interest. Of course I could go and look see their PC with its problem but can’t stand the thought of all the confused gibberish I’ll have to listen to.

On the other hand anyone that does know BCU and they mention some issue then I don’t mind trying to help out. Back to the former. Someone rang to say that Word or Office had ‘gone’. He wanted to know whether he should uninstall the ‘gone’ Word or Office, and reinstall Word, or Office. How he was going to uninstall something that had ‘gone’ beats the devil out of me. Anyway I asked him what made him thing it had ‘gone’ and the answer was that when he started Word it had lost all his documents. And how did he know that? Also when he received an email from someone with an attachment it wouldn’t open. Hmm… But all his documents were all OK and found in MS Works. But that was no good as all his friends used Word or Office and none used MS Works. Sounds the wrong way round to me.

I mentioned to him that the documents weren’t lost but that Word was just looking in the wrong place when he tried to Open a document. Why Word had lost sight of the docs folder is probably not worth thinking about. I tried to tell him how to change where Word looks for documents but got a feeling that bit of advice may not have worked.

This person is regarded as a bit of a geek in his circles and has a reputation for knowing how to do stuff and people phone him up when they have a PC problem. Heaven knows how confusing those conversations are.

There’s no doubt that since I installed SP3 for Office 2003 my Vista PC has started behaving oddly.

Outlook keeps stalling for up to 20 seconds at a time as does IE7, which additionally stalls completely sometimes. I’ve ended up several times starting another instance of IE7 and once even a third instance of IE7, while Vista thinks about what it wants to do next. And this is day one with SP3. When IE7 has jammed itself shut I have to use Task Manager to abandon the process, after which Vista always helpfully pops up a window that it is looking for a solution to the problem. Which it never does as the problem keeps happening. Is Microsoft in a headlong rush to turn all our operating systems into junk?

Office 2003 is very bound in with the operating system and I assume with Vista probably more so than with the older XP. On my Vista PC I have the full version of Office 2003, which contains Word, Access, Excel, Publisher, Powerpoint, Outlook, Infopath (What the heck is that? Ed) and Office Tools. What would happen if I uninstalled the whole Office suite? Is there any chance of Vista still working after a load of its guts have been removed? Probably would work OK as Microsoft would have tested that scenario.

But what if we ran some devious little tests such as removing individual Office applications one at a time, with reboots in between. Even worse than that, what about if you removed Outlook, Access, Powerpoint and Excel, with the reboots in between and then started reinstalling some of these applications one at a time. What chance of Vista staying stable after that.

Of course you could get smart and knock up a whole load of test scenarios with the installation, uninstall and reinstallation of Office applications in various orders with a whole load of decent expected results and it would be a good testing exercise, but don’t expect me to do it.

Someone, somewhere in the World has probably done one or some of these test scenarios but not as a test but as a real necessary action. Wonder what happened?