Why on earth would anyone want to run Vista Office with only 128 MBs of RAM ? George Ou at ZDnet says that Web-based word processors like ThinkFree Office makes computers slow down as it hogs memory resources like a worm. Well, I think web based softwares using Ajax is something that will stay for awhile as most companies are trying hard to make sure staff don’t simply install illegal software on their PCs.

The moral of the story : Get more RAM. Its cheaper than gold now and 1GB seems so passe.

Google’s newly acquired Writely should hardly be considered a replacement for Microsoft Office, Word Perfect, OpenOffice.org Write, or any other rich client. The only Web-based word processor or Office Suite that comes close to something like Microsoft Office is ThinkFree Office which is written in Java. But ThinkFree Office makes resource-hogging OpenOffice.org look good by comparison. Just the word processor alone with no data loaded eats up 100 MBs of RAM. Loading up the spread sheet and presentation software will cost you another 200 MBs of RAM. Oh and if you actually want some data with that, you better prepare a Gigabyte of RAM. Vista on the other hand will run on a computer with 128 MBs of RAM (without any Aero Glass eye candy).

Truth is: Web Office takes more resources than Vista source

Microsoft’s IEblog has posted about the release of the “real” Beta 2 version of IE7 for Windows XP SP2. They say:

“This evening we released IE7 Beta 2 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie. This release is not the preview or the update to the preview, but the real Beta 2 of IE7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows XP 64-bit Edition. Simply: please try it.

“We acted on a lot of the feedback and bug reports from the previous public releases. In particular, I feel good about changes we made based on reports from web developers around some CSS behaviors, application compatibility feedback, reliability data (yes, we do analyze the information that comes when you click “Send Error Report”), and user experience feedback. People on the team will post additional details about changes over the next few days.”

The way Windows Vista is disappearing over the horizon, we’re going to need an XP version sooner rather than later.

Microsoft has released a Beta 2 “preview” of its Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), now named Windows Internet Explorer (see logo above).

You can download it from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/default.mspx

It has a bit of a Firefox look about it and lots of new stuff. But the PageRank bar doesn’t seem to work, and Bloglines also won’t come up in the browser. There’s quite a lot of stuff not working.

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