Starting November 12, people will have the opportunity to purchase a low-cost XO laptop computer. You can purchase two XO laptops for $399 and one will go to a child in a developing country and one will be sent to your child at home. They will have green and white casing, run on open source software, and have a screen with high resolution. This laptop does not consume as much power as a regular one and is able to be powered by solar energy, hand cranks, and electricity.

Here’s the catch - consumers may only make a purchase of a low price computer, if they choose to also buy another computer as a donation to a child who is overseas and underprivileged. This new concept is called, the “give one get one” campaign, created by Nicholas Negroponte from MIT Media Laboratory, it will run for two weeks and will only be available in the U.S. and Canada.

The first 25, 000 buyers will have a guaranteed delivery by Christmas of 2007. Later buyers will have their computers delivered sometime in the first part of the New Year, 2008.

You will only be able to take advantage of this promotion by calling toll-free 1-800-201-7144 or by visiting the following website on or after November 12th – http://xogiving.org

Many users are starting to face the trouble of opening Microsoft Office 2007 documents with previous versions of Microsoft Office. In Office 2007 Microsoft introduced a new file format called the Microsoft Open Office XML Format (.docx). This format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word. This is why it does not allow you to simply double click the attachment or file and open it because it is not a typical Office (.doc) format. Nevertheless, you can still open these files without having to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007.

You need to install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for 2007 Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint File Formats and any necessary high priority Office updates. By using the Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office system, you can open, edit some items, and save Office Word 2007 documents in previous versions of Word. Below are the system requirements in order to download and install the compatibility pack to open Office 2007 files and the link for the download:

• Microsoft Word 2000 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2000 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 with Service Pack 3
  
• Microsoft Word 2002 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2002 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 with Service Pack 3
  
• Microsoft Office Word 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 with at least Service Pack 1

HP, Intel Microsoft, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments are promoting the new USB 3.0 device. It is said to deliver more than ten times the data transfer than what the USB 2.0 is capable of offering. This will allow users to utilize this tool for consumer electronics and mobile applications, made especially for media files that exceed 25GB.

USB 3.0 is backwards compatible and will decrease the use of power consumption. The SuperSpeed USB provides a 10X boost in transfer rate (from 480-Mbits/s in USB 2.0 to 4.8 GB in USB 3.0), at the same time lowering the amount of power consumption.

An example shown in PC Magazine, describes one of the significant workings of the new gadget: “One example of their speed goals is to transfer a 27GB HD movie to a portable device in 70 seconds. The same thing would take 15 minutes or more with HighSpeed USB (2.0)”.

SuperSpeed is due on the market in the middle of 2008.

In some computers, every time you run a Microsoft Office application after a new MS Office installation, it prompts for the Microsoft Office End User License Agreement (EULA). If you click ‘I accept’ it goes off and re-appears when you run the application again the next time.

This is a situation which occurs when you do not have enough rights to modify certain registry keys with your login id. To resolve this issue, you will have to modify the local registry keys and give appropriate permission to the current users.

Follow the steps below to fix the issue:

• Log in as an Administrator on the local machine - Run the registry editor using ‘regedt32’ command
  
  
• locate the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office
  
  
• Then select the appropriate sub key based on the Office version you have
  * For the 2007 Microsoft Office Suites: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0
  * For Microsoft Office 2003: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0
  * For Microsoft Office 2002: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0
  * For Microsoft Office 2000: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0
  
  
• Right click on the appropriate sub key and select permission
• Select ‘Users’ (Computer_name\Users), and then click to select the ‘Allow’ check box for the Full Control permission
• 
  Click OK and then close the Registry Editor
• 
  Run the Office program, and then accept the End User License Agreement This will fix the issue as now the user will have enough permission to write to the registry sub key, which is connected to the MS Office EULA.

For best results, once you are done with the above, run the registry editor again and remove the Full Control permission that you gave to Users. To do this, locate the same registry sub key, select permission, Point Computer_name\Users, and then click to clear the ‘Allow’ check box for the Full Control permission, and then exit the Registry Editor.