A month later I actually got round to having the console collected, and off it went on a jaunt to Germany. Procrastination is seemingly still rife for me when it comes to some things, despite having a job that should supposedly make me get stuff done.

Still, just over a week later and it was returned to me – complete with a month’s free XBL gold and a sheet explaining that not only had they replaced the motherboard (which was expected given the RROD) but also the DVD drive, which was unexpected. This has seemingly caused my Xbox to get quieter, as the DVD drive was never particularly subtle and the fans make one hell of a noise, and I’m certainly not going to complain about that.

All in all, excepting the fact that some shoddy design has been involved and has lead to it failing, I’m quite happy with how the process has worked. I’d have probably had it back working within 10 days had I been more efficient with getting it sent off, and Microsoft have been quite good with the communications as to the repair status. Of course, I know people who have had multiple failures, and I’m going to be wary of that happening again – but touch wood I’ll avoid that problem.

By default both of these are the 2003 versions, and there’s always been a number of things that have annoyed me. So when a co-worker recently pointed me in the direction of the internal pilots for newer versions of both of these, I set about installing them.

The first, and most noticeable difference, is obviously the appearance. Office 2007 has famously done away with conventional menus and toolbars in favour of the ribbons, although seemingly not across all applications in all circumstances as Outlook only uses them when editing individual items (be they emails, calendar entries or tasks). Office Communicator 2007 also has a UI change, heading towards the Microsoft Live Messenger style, which is probably better than ribbons as there’s not really much scope for them in an IM application. Aside from the obvious niggle that neither of these applications now fit with the rest of the look and feel of my operating systems, the interfaces are actually usable and the ribbon makes a lot of sense.

Moving on from the initial visual impressions and onto the new features, a number of the things that annoyed me appear to have been fixed (such as only being able to search for contacts in communicator in ‘Surname, Firstname’ form – although it doesn’t yet go as far as working by mailid) and there are a number of new features that I like (such as being able to view other people’s calendars in overlay mode with your own).

Communicator 2007 also now stores the conversation logs in a folder in Outlook, making it much easier to find the conversation you had with someone last week compared to the previous implementation we had involving a (often broken) web interface, and also offers an easy way to view previous logs when a conversation has been resumed.

The addition of document previews and image resizing in emails within Outlook is good too, allowing for a quicker look at the contents of attachments without having to load other applications – although it appears we are yet to acquire previewers for PDF files.

I’ve yet to use the other applications properly – having only viewed a couple of Word documents briefly, but if my experience with the editor in Outlook is anything to go by they’re certainly quite usable. The popup formatting element when you select text, for example, is very useful for quickly editing documents.

So far the only downside I’ve discovered, is that they might use slightly more RAM, which can be somewhat of an issue given my machine needs more memory at the best of times when running the variety of other applications that I need to do my job at times.

All in all, Office 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 are a good improvement over their predecessors and I’m happy with them so far.