Adventures in Microsoft Office

I seem to have got a huge amount of comments recently, including the fastest commented upon entry in the history of my Livejournal (15 comments, which for people like l_s_q must seem rather a slow day). Are people so bored of summer that they're hanging around LJ hitting Refresh? Like me?

This evening I finally decided to do something about the way that Microsoft Office doesn't quite work on this computer - a problem that I'm responsible for, as my tactic for installing it was to copy and paste the entire MSOffice directory from my old laptop to this one.

My first plan was to simply go in to the Windows system folder of my old computer and take all the DLLs that it said that it was missing one by one until it worked, but this was hampered when I turned the thing on and found that its monitor had broken down. It wasn't until after I connected it up to another of the several monitors in my room and got confused about which of the four keyboards on my desk I was supposed to be using that I remembered that we would, in fact, have the Microsoft Office CD.

Down I went to the study, ready to search through the unlabelled collection of CD cases that my father keeps there. After a brief hunt through Frontpage, Toolbook, Rise of the Robots 2, and other essential academic software, I eventually picked out the one I was looking for... sadly it's turned out to be Office 95, but seriously, how much difference between the versions can there be?

So I stuck that in the drive and now it's asking me for a serial code. I have a feeling that the code in question was thrown out about five years ago, and I certainly don't remember a certificate of authenticity (most likely because it was nicked from the RGU in the first place). If anyone can come to my aid here, please feel free.

Update! When idly looking at the serial code screen after searching the Internet without any success, I absently typed a string of "1"s in to the box and couldn't believe my eyes when it worked. Unfortunately, redistributer is right in saying that there are differences, and my computer is now having considerable trouble opening any kind of document at all. Back to non-working Office 97 it is. Kruzitürchen.