Yabby, all you needed to say was that you have specialised needs for windows that you have put time and effort into which works for you. That would have been a fair comment, nuff said so to speak :)

There was no need for you to deride a system you are not familiar with, this is how we get into these long and arduous rants :)

So in the end did you find an alternative to doutlook? :P~

As we near the end of this thread, Yabby, there are still two questions that I feel need to be answered at some point.

One is straightforward: did you get around to replacing Outlook Express, or did you simply pay up?

(Incidentally, this gives rise to another thought: what have you been using for email in the meantime...?)

The other is more complicated, and you might like to think about it for a while.

Why are you investing so much time and energy in defending Microsoft?

You clearly have no serious interest in considering alternatives. You can't really be bothered to understand why there are people who prefer those alternatives. And you trot out all the mindless slogans used by Microsoft to denigrate those people, without really thinking them through.

In fact, why did you start this thread in the first place, if you never intended listening to the feedback?

Sorry, that's three questions.

Or four, if you count the one in parentheses.

I just had a quick Google for what other Windows folk have done about the lack of email in Windows 7.

Here are a couple of snippets.

"Unfortunately, the last version of Outlook Express (6.0) was bundled with Internet Explorer 6.0...and Windows 7 will not allow you to install IE 6.0 in order to get Outlook Express. However, if you want to go so far as to install the Windows XP virtual PC within Windows 7, then you can install and run Outlook Express in the XP virtual machine."

Hmmmm. Doesn't exactly meet the "no tinkering" standard, I think.

But I'm really surprised your supplier didn't point it out. It does after all provide your ideal solution - Outlook Express under Windows 7.

This one made me laugh, though.

"Windows 7 has an email client included: See folder \Program Files\Windows Mail\ Within this folder there is a HIDDEN file "WinMail.exe". This is the well-known 'Windows Mail' from Vista. But this program doesn't work. To get it work you need to replace the file 'msoe.dll' in this folder with a version of Vista (you need the same version from Vista: 32-bit or 64-bit). To replace 'msoe.dll' in Windows 7 you need to take ownership of 'msoe.dll'."

And here's an early indicator that we're on the downward slope.

"Here's some beef with WML ... I just upgraded my Vista business laptop to Win7 and now have absolutely no access to all the emails I saved to my hard drive. Not only that, but if I want to send an email, it sends it from live.com and not my Verizon email account or my business website email account. I need to be able to import all my Vista Windows Mail emails and contacts and seemingly have no way to do it. Thanks Microsoft!"

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7network/thread/6251127f-e8c7-4abf-81ca-b321a4ccbf6d

It is very sensible of you to outsource all this pain, Yabby.

*did you get around to replacing Outlook Express, or did you simply pay up?*

Pericles, I still haven't made a final decision, so meantime I'm
running two email programmes. I'm using Windows Mail to find out
how good or bad it really is. There I have had to change how I used
to file things into folders and use the folder system in IE.
Meantime, as I think I mentioned, when my computer man popped in
the first time, he pushed a couple of buttons or whatever and hey
presto, my old Outlook from Office 2000 worked in XP mode
or something similar. He did say that Outlook is in fact available
to purchase separately in its latest version, something which I did
not see on the MS website.

So short term I'll just use those two and maybe later on, when my
mind is not so focussed on a couple of livestock nutrition
experiments, I'll make a decision. There is really no rush to do
anything, now that those two are working ok.

*Why are you investing so much time and energy in defending Microsoft?*

Hang on, for me OLO is time to relax and unwind lol, it takes my
mind off more complicated challenges that I'm busily solving.
I did in fact try some of Rstuarts suggestions, even mentioned that
if/when I bought a laptop, I might try Linux just for fun, so that
I can compare both systems.

I simply don't see the issue as black and white as many of you do
or the reasons that you give don't affect me in the same way as
they seem to affect you.

IMHO credit where credit is due and it was Gates who broke the
Apple monopoly and through a cheap operating system, enabled the
PC revolution. Clearly hundreds of millions think that they are
getting value for money, or they would not buy his programmes.

cont.

Your points have in fact been valuable, as they made me write down
exactly what I had spent on software over the years and what it
cost me per year of use. There is a certain objectivity in that.

So for me the MS story is not black and white as for many here, but
shades of gray, we each have a different situation and circumstances,
which gives us a different perspective. That was my point to
Rawmustard.

Yabby: "IMHO credit where credit is due and it was Gates who broke the Apple monopoly and through a cheap operating system, enabled the PC revolution."

No he didn't. Firstly, there never wasn't a monopoly. At the very least is was CP/M versus the Apple ][ versus the Commodore 64 versus the Atari versus ... a whole pile of ecosystem of little PC's.

What wiped out most of them wasn't Gates. And it wasn't IBM, who produced the first PC, even though it was only the PC and Apple who were left standing at the end. Do you know what it was Yabby? I bet you don't.

Although IBM produced the first PC, they did it in an odd way, for IBM anyway. Rather than use all in-house components, they used stuff off the shelf. That included the operating system, which was Microsoft's MSDOS, one the off the shelf operating systems available at the time for the CPU they were using. Yes, the choose Microsoft because Bill Gates by all reports did a sterling sell job. But there were any number of others they could have chosen, and in the end it wouldn't have made much difference. Microsoft didn't even write the original MSDOS, they bought it.

Not only did IBM use off the shelf components, they published the design. You could (and I did) buy the PC/XT technical manual which had circuit diagrams for the entire machine. In fact it even contained the complete source code for IBM's BIOS. I guess that BIOS could be considered one of the very first pieces of open source software.

As a consequence, anybody could knock off IBM's design, go buy the same components as IBM did and start producing near identical PC's. This included the operating system IBM used, which could be bought from Microsoft. Hundreds if not thousands of OEM's did just that. Every OEM slavishly followed IBM's design because otherwise it would not run MSDOS. When IBM produced the next designs, the PC/XP and later the PC/AT, the pattern was repeated.

(cont'd...)