Mona wrote:

Quote
Thanks, Lynn. I'm afraid you lost me a little in some of your pc-speak
Oops. Sorry about that. If you are referring to my technobabble about virtual machines (VMs), the point may be moot, after all. I did a little more research and found that, at least under the beta version of Windows 7, Word 2000 would run in a VM, but it was *painfully* slow. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/01/windows_7_xp_mode_review/) So that wouldn't have been a good solution, after all.

Quote
but the gist seems to be that because I'm used to older Word and don't need it for anything "fancy" Open Office would work fine, perhaps easier and better than paying $149 for MS Office 7?
Yup. That's the bottom line. In any event, it is certainly worth giving OpenOffice a try, since the price is right.

Google Docs is another free option, but it has two drawbacks:

1) You must have a Google account
2) Your documents are all kept online

I personally have both privacy and security concerns about entrusting my documents to Google, but a lot of people do use their service.

cheers,
Lynn