Microsoft Office 2007 clone

[Liam McDuff]

My Dell Laptop came with Microsoft Office preinstalled and no disk. I want to copy the program so that I can use it on my Dell PC. I was told I could just clone the one program to a disk and then install onto the PC. I have lookedfor software to do this but all is about cloning a whole hard drive and that is not what I want to do. Can anyone help me on this?
Thank you

 

[lxskllr]

AFAIK it can't be done; not without Herculean effort anyway. You'd also likely be violating the license.

 

[Harvey]

1. No, you can't just copy or "clone" the files from the Program Files folde. MS Office must be installed using an installation disk or file. When you install program, it enters a lot of information in the Registry that tells the system where all of the program components are located, how they interact and a lot more.

2. The copy of Office that came on your Dell laptop is licensed to you ONLY for use on your laptop. It is not a retail version of the program that you can transfer from one machine to another. Even if it was a retail copy, the license restricts the number of machines on which it can be installed at one time. If the version you buy does not state that it can be installed on more than one machine, the answer is one.

What you're trying to do is software piracy, plain and simple. If you want a free office program, you can try Open Office or Libre Office. They are very similar programs. In fact, Libre Office is an offshoot of Open Office. Both proograms read and write MS Office compatible files. I'll leave it to others to say which is better.

The only problem with either of them is that they require Java to be installed on your machine, which wasn't much of a concern until massive security vulnerabilities were reported that were so bad that the NSA issued an alert recommending disabling it on all machines. I stopped recommending Open Office and Libre Office when these problems were made public.

Oracle (the maker of Java) has issued several security updates that are supposed to address the issues. I hope they got all of them because Open Office and Libre Office have saved several of my friends a lot of money, but even if it's free, no program is worth having a machine that's can be harnessed by cyber-criminals and terrorists so do your homework to make sure you feel secure with Java on your machine. The current version of Java is 1.7.0.17. If you are running a 64-bit OS, you need to install both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

P.S. If you have any older version of Java installed on your machine, uninstall it, NOW. It is freaking dangerous!

 

[lxskllr]

The Java vulnerabilities should be minimal as long as you aren't using a Java plugin on the browser.