Nightmare Upgrade to Office 2007

Back in January I bought my spiffy new Dell Inspiron. I love the laptop, but I'm having software issues.

The laptop came with Office 2003 Small Business Edition. Along with that, it qualified for an upgrade to Office 2007, but that has to be redeemed through a special website.

I've been trying to redeem that upgrade since January 12th, with no luck.

I've tried the online form, the phone number, and the email address. I've called Dell several times, I've called Microsoft, and I've called the 3rd party company who is handling the upgrade redemption process. No luck.

For some reason, nobody can find my Certificate of Authenticity in the upgrade system. It appears that my copy of Office 2003 doesn't exist in the appropriate database. What a load!

We'll see how it goes. Maybe I can get somebody to fix this mess.

What's Up With Standby?

My laptop was doing terrific with the "standby" feature, until today. For some reason, when I press the power button (which is supposed to put it on standby), it actually goes into hibernation. It looks like something might be wrong with my power settings. Poop.

If you're a laptop owner, you should definitely check out the different power features of your machine. These can be vital to getting more battery life out of the machine. For instance, I have a setting configured for maximum battery life. It dims the screen, turns the display off when not in use, etc. Very useful.

Also, you should learn about standby and hibernation. From my understanding, they do almost the same thing. However, standby actually uses more power, but it is quicker to resume from. Basically, they save where you are working "power down" your machine, and let you pick up where you left off. I rarely shut my laptop down. It's almost always just on standby. It saves loads of time.

Dell and Win XP - A Bad Match?

I'm not sure if this falls under a Windows problem or one for Dell, but here goes.

I had my Inspiron E1405 on hibernate. I took it out of the bag, opened the screen, and pressed the power button. Instead of coming back into Windows with my programs where I left them, the machine opened up Dell's MediaDirect program. What?! I then had to exit from MediaDirect, at which point I was finally taken to Windows.

I'm really not sure what happened. Perhaps I accidentally pressed the MediaDirect button on the front of the machine. I really don't think I did, but it's possible.

More than likely, Dell and Windows are having an internal fight somewhere. I'm not sure how MediaDirect works, but it seems to bypass the standard standby and hibernate features. Windows might not appreciate that.

I guess I'll just be more careful next time.