Here I am at David Williams’ house, fixing his computer problems. His version of Word was telling him that his document had somehow timed out, and then the software would crash. I didn’t try to test for that problem, since David told me what he REALLY wanted was to install a new version of Office, Office 2007.
I started out by uninstalling Word, but it turns out that wasn’t enough. As I was installing, I got an error message that the product key was not correct. I double checked it, had David read it aloud. Nope. It was exactly what was on the box.
You know, I saw a sign on a fire department building yesterday that said, “Just in case, have a meeting place.” It took me a while to figure that one out. I was thinking about places to have meetings, and then why “Just in case.” Finally it dawned on me that they are asking regular people to have a disaster plan, and the first step is to set up WHERE you will rendezvous if you get separated.
Computer stuff is like that. If the product key gets separated from the CD, then you are in enough deep river mud to sink you. Especially if you’ve already deleted the previous version of the software. But David did come up with the product key, and then it wasn’t working.
I found a phone number to call Microsoft. Really, 1-800-MICROSOFT. They take you through a bunch of options and finally suggest you look up a certain code on the support.microsoft site. This particular issue’s code is KB836178.
The Knowledge Base told us to go back and be sure to take ALL the old versions of Office off the computer. We did that, and then reinstalled the new software, and everything is hunky-dory. I’m just typing this to make sure I can type for over ten minutes and not somehow get this weird thing.
