Not sure what Microsoft office package to pick?

Save yourself the expense of MS Office and install the !FREE! LibreOffice. LibreOffice is an open source office suite that does 99% of the stuff MSOffice does - far more features than you will ever use - and which can open/edit/modify MS Word and other Office files. Give it a try before you go out and spend money out of your rather tight budget.

For future reference: whenever you purchase software, if it comes on media make a copy of it and store it in a special place where you store such things. Write the license key on the original and duplicate media - you won't lose the license key that way. If it is software you download, odds are there is a way to burn a hard copy, so do that and again, write the serial number. Finally, for basically "ultimate" protection of your purchases, put any license keys you get into something you can't lose: your e-mail contact list or something similar. You can create an entry for each package or create a series titled something like keys1, keys2, etc. and just add the licenses to the notes field until you have to make a new entry.

Finally, the odds are you had the same license on both computers since you are able to put it on 3 of them (I think?). If that is the case, you can use the Magic Jelly Bean Key Finder to get the key from the machine that didn't fail. Also, check with the school ... a lot of schools have a licensing agreement with MS so that their students can install a copy from the school. Check with the IT department if nothing else and you feel you just *have* to have MS Office.

So did your Laptop crash or was it the desktop ?

You can buy MS Word by itself to use to create resumes etc. This you can install on the Laptop, and leave the desktop as it is. This may indeed be cheaper then buying the whole Microsoft Office Suite.

If the people around you insist on getting the Microsoft Office then let them pitch in some of the money required to buy the whole Office suite.

Buying MS Word itself will not give you Excel and PowerPoint programs. So if you look at the big picture , it is as if you do need the Whole Office suite.

I think you can probably buy the Microsoft Office to be installed on more than one computer.

You can save a whole bunch of money if you simply think about getting Open Office. There is a little learning curve regarding using it. The good thing is that it is entirely free. Google it and you can do more research about it.

You can purchase just Word, but you will pay way more for Word alone than if you purchase the entire Office suite. It sounds ridiculous, but it's true. It's just the way Microsoft packages and sells their product.

Currently there are two versions of Office software:

1) Office 365: this is the cloud version. In this case, you are actually renting the software. You can pay a year up front, or pay it monthly, but either way you are bound to a year contract. But there is no software to have to install as everything is maintained on Microsoft's servers (i.e., the cloud). I personally don't care for this version because I want to own my own software. But that's just me.

2) Office 2013: this is the current desktop version. That means, you buy the software and you own it outright. You install it on your computer just like any other version.

If you prefer one of the older versions (Office 2007 or Office 2010), while they have been discontinued in as far as no new copies are being manufactured by Microsoft, you can still purchase either version from various online Office supply stores who still have some copies in their warehouse. You can do a search (yahoo, google, etc) to see who is cheaper. But I'd start at amazon.com because their prices are hard to beat

Two other options:

1) If you don't to buy anything, you can use Microsoft's free version of Office 2013. It's still the cloud version, but it's free. Why is it free? Well it's a very basic version of the software, but it has all of the features you would need as an average user. To use it, you just need to set up yourself a microsoft account (and anybody can create an account). That is here:

https://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&rps...

2) If you still prefer the free route, and you want to have some software installed on your computer, you can get one of the generic office programs. They are all pretty much the same. About the biggest difference is in how often the vendor updates his software. So IMV the best of the lot is Libre office. It has an entire suite of programs that will edit or create any Word, Excel, Powerpoint or Access file. That is here:

http://www.libreoffice.org/

Most colleges and universities offer Microsoft Office to students for free or a price that is merely a token. The first thing to do is to check with the librarian at your college and ask whether or not your school makes this offer. If it does, that’s your best bet.

If your college doesn’t make this offer, then you can still get office at a steeply discounted rate here:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/office-university

If you are a student, but not a college or university student, then there is yet another program for you to get Microsoft Office at a specially discounted price here:

http://www.microsoft.com/student/

Here's a wild idea:

Why don't you just call Microsoft and ask them for your PAID FOR MS-Office Activation Code?

You would have registered MSO when you originally installed it, and you shouldn't have to PAY twice.

TIP: And I second LibreOffice (OpenOffice has fewer Updates since Apache took it over), nobody needs to BUY MSO, for school, period.