Hi,

From a non-academic user perspective I believe that aside from the annual cost of licensing, we do find some of the improvements to the basic SPSS/PASW package and a few add-ons, to be useful (for example, the ability to save large files as multiple Excel worksheets, multiple data editor windows, etc.), and can justify our expenditures because of the associated increase in productivity. However, most of the changes associated with new releases are marginal, and do not add significantly to our output. We are currently using version 17, on XP platforms with SP3, and do not experience any issues once relevant patches have been applied. We do use new machines with either core 2 duo processors or dual core processors, and lots of RAM (>2gb). Data files tend to be in excess of 1.5gb, also.

For what it's worth, I must also note that our applications are overwhelmingly related to data manipulation and to a lesser extent, statistical analysis. Therefore if there are issues with a similar hardware/OS combination, it may be due to running complex statistical analyses, rather than data manipulation.

Hope this helps

Mike

From: SPSSX(r) Discussion [mailto:SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Audam, Suzette Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 10:59 AM To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: Can we "freeze" at SPSS 15 for several years?

I'm quite interested in hearing what others have to say on this. At this moment I'm preparing training material to aid staff in transitioning to version 17 but I see 18 is already here. My organization is still using version 13, and we manage to get our work done quite smoothly. The yearly updates are annoying, and licenses have become very costly. We too have had the debate about SPSS vs. Stata, and we do have several here who prefer and actually use Stata. Before making the new versions of SPSS software available to all staff, I usually have to evaluate it, document changes and then train staff. This is all time consuming. We never moved to version 15, because it was constantly crashing and was very slow. I'm curious to know if others have had problems using version 17, particularly while running Windows XP.

Suzette Audam Research Associate/Data Manager Guttmacher Institute 125 Maiden Lane, 7th floor New York, NY 10038 phone: 212 248-1111 ext 2282 fax: 212 248-1951

________________________________ From: SPSSX(r) Discussion [mailto:SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Riccò Matteo Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 10:14 AM To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Can we "freeze" at SPSS 15 for several years?

I quote Sonia and Marta

In our department, we use regularly SPSS on Windows-based and Mac OsX-based devices. Well: we have the same problem noticed by Marta and, moreover, the annoying situation of Macs able to deploy the new Mac OSX 10.6 and the actual impossibility to do it, 'cos SPSS/PASW would be unusable for not-well-explained-incompatibility-issues (bleah!). Now, personly, I'm questioning about buying a new Laptop, that I need in order to use decently the pachidermic SPSS 17, but eventually will be useless until a new version (requesting a simple downloadable patch is something beyond the possibilities of SPSS/PASW/IBM team?)

So: not only the issues associated with a new version every single year are not trivial (as stated by Sonia), but also the actually lacking support from the seller is not trivial, IMHO.

Tschuess

MR