One of many useful things about Mac OS X is the system-wide spelling checker.

By using the standard text input routines, developers get spellchecking for free. I don't know about you, but my problem is usually not that I can't spell, but that my fingers don't always manage to do quite the right thing where keyboards are concerned.

So not only do I benefit from getting spellchecking on almost everything I type, it also helps if I only have to maintain one personal dictionary rather than one for each application.

Trouble is, several of the applications I use daily either have their own spellchecker - largely for cross-platform considerations, as is the case with Microsoft Office and Firefox - or they don't provide spellchecking at all (eg, Skype).

Still, anything that reduces the number of places where I have to teach my computer a specialist vocabulary such as company and product names is a good thing.

Some people are probably far more careful than I am, but a common question is "how do I remove a word from the personal dictionary?" It's all too easy to click "Learn Spelling" instead of "Ignore Spelling", or to add a misspelled word - especially an unfamiliar name - to the dictionary.

And that's where a relatively new prefpane comes in. Two AM Software's free Dictionary Cleaner makes it easy to review the words from your personal dictionary and delete any that are in error.

You can also use Dictionary Cleaner to add words, but the word-at-a-time interface isn't particularly convenient. If you have a word list to import, it's probably easier to open or paste it in TextEdit, force a spellcheck, and then right-click to add any that are not recognised. That way, you know you aren't adding any words that already exist in the main dictionary.

PS: Want to edit your custom dictionary in Word 2008? In Word, choose Preferences from the Word Menu. Select Spelling and Grammar, then click the Dictionaries button. (If you have multiple custom dictionaries, make sure that the one you want to edit is ticked.) Click Edit, and the word list will open. Delete any unwanted entries, making sure that each word remains on a separate line, then save your changes.

The University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index has been tracking the PC industry (among others) since 1994. Over that period, things have generally changed for the worse, apart from one standout: Apple.

You can find the detailed numbers here, but here are some key findings.

The index for the whole industry has fallen from 78 to 74, a fall of 5.1 percent over the entire period and of 1.3 percent since last year.

Apple, in contrast, has risen from 77 to 85, a rise of 10.4 percent and 7.6 percent year on year. It is the only PC maker to record a score of 80 or better in recent years, though Dell did manage an 80 in 2000.

"It's hard not to be impressed with Apple," said Professor Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI.

But talking of Dell, it was the only other company to show an improvement on 2007. But a score of 75 puts it a distant second behind Apple. That 10 point gap is one of the largest recorded by ACSI in any industry.

While this is good news for Apple, it's not good for the personal computer industry. Among the sectors measured during the second quarter (ACSI looks at a particular subset of sectors in each quarter), only one had a lower satisfaction score: Internet news and information.

Internet portals and search engines, automobiles and light vehicles, consumer electronics, and major appliances all outscored personal computers.

The PC brand with the lowest satisfaction score was Compaq (now part of HP, but tracked separately, presumably for historical reasons). With a score of 70, only one other company did worse in the second quarter, and that was AOL.

Who came out on top? Lexus and BMW, with scores of 87.

But to show people aren't only satisfied with expensive purchases, Google (which is free as far as search is concerned) led its category with an impressive 86.

But back to Apple: it's worth noting that the increase in satisfaction has come during a period when the company has attracted a significant number of switchers from Windows-based PCs. So are those high satisfaction numbers the result of customers' relief that they don't have to put up with Windows any more, or is Apple really doing a significantly better job than other PC vendors?

I suspect it's some of each - but what do you think?

Microsoft has fixed a diverse collection of bugs - sorry, issues - in the latest update for Office 2008. But Office 2004 users don't miss out completely.

The 160M update to version 12.1.2 plugs a critical security bug in Excel, speeds up calculations, tidies up some loose ends for particular locales, and opens workbooks containing sheets with characters such as the slash in their names, among other issues.

Word gets a once-over, with faster launch times and fixes for the display of tables, headers and footers, and form fields.

If you spend as much time using Entourage as I do, you'll be pleased to see improvements such as improved syncing with iCal and Address Book, and better display of certain message elements - have you ever seen an HTML message with a seemingly blank body?

And if you use SSL connections to mail servers, you'll be glad to know that Entourage now provides an appropriate warning if there's a mismatch in the server's certificate.

As you might expect, the update includes the latest time zone information and junk email filter, and if you correspond with people in Japan you may be pleased to see that latest Japanese postal code dictionary is provided.

Microsoft also says that new AppleScripts dropped into the appropriate folders should appear in the Script menus without having to restart the applications.

If you're still on Office 2004, the update is a lot smaller at less than 15M, but it only includes security patches for Excel and PowerPoint, a fix for a Word bug that rears its head when you open a document containing a numbered list, and the new Japanese postal code dictionary.

The easiest way to get the update for your copy of Office is to run the Microsoft AutoUpdate utility.

If your experience is anything like mine, you'll have noticed the growth in the number of corporate-looking types wielding MacBooks in coffee shops, on aircraft, and at conferences.

According to Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio, "[business] adoption and acceptance of Mac hardware and operating system software are growing at a steady and sustained pace not seen since the late 1980s."

A new Yankee Group survey of "750 global IT administrators and C-level executives found that nearly four out of five businesses... have Mac sand the OS X operating system installed in their networks."

So it's not just a question of buyers liking Apple's hardware specs but choosing to run Windows or Linux.

We're not, it seems, talking about one or two Macs being allowed in to cater for designers and other 'traditional' (stereotypical?) Mac users: "Nearly one-quarter, or close to 25%, of the survey respondents have a significant number - greater than 30 or 50 - of Apple Macs and OS X 10.x OS software present in their corporate networks."

But I'm not sure about some of the reasons the DiDio puts forward as an explanation for the adoption of Macs growing at a "pace not seen since the late 1980s."

Safari? If that were true, wouldn't the takeup of Safari for Windows be higher than it is?

iChat? Maybe, but Microsoft's instant messaging solution seems to be widely used in businesses, and iChat doesn't (as far as I know) interoperate with that.

FileVault? Yes, I'll pay that one. People are becoming increasingly aware of the need to protect data on devices that are carried around. And Apple did the right thing by providing a 'master' password for administrators in case the individual user forgets theirs or abruptly leaves the organisation.

Time Machine? No, that's really a personal backup facility. While it can be used in conjunction with Mac OS X Server, I reckon features such as de-duplication are needed before it becomes relevant to most businesses.

A "much faster search engine" (Spotlight)? Perhaps. Desktop search is increasingly important, and decent performance on current hardware and software means Spotlight can't be considered a mark against Apple.

Embedded virtualisation capabilities? I'm not sure what DeDio has in mind there. Presumably it's a reference to Boot Camp (but that's for dual booting, not virtualisation) or possibly to third-party virtualisation products such as Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, which allow the use of guest operating systems such as Windows or Linux 'inside' Mac OS X.

Back to My Mac? Well, maybe, But my experience is that this feature is a bit fussy about the local routers at each end of the connection. Some people will point to the fact that it requires a $119 MobileMe subscription, but that's cheaper than using GoToMyPC ($US179 per year, falling to $126 per year if more than 20 systems are licensed), and MobileMe includes a bunch of other features.

So why do I think more and more businesses are installing Macs? The move from Windows XP to Vista represents a major change, so people are looking around and considering the alternatives. This is leading to a new wave of pockets of Mac use within organisations.

The real test will be whether those experiments spread to other parts of the business.

In Apple's own words, the transition from .Mac to MobileMe has been "rocky" and the source of "pain" for some users. Consequently, the affair has garnered the company a good deal of adverse publicity.

Let's assume that Apple sorts out the remaining technical issues. Yeah, call me an Apple apologist if you must, but that's not the aspect that I want to talk about here and now.

Does MobileMe offer value for money? Even Hydrapinion's Anthony Caruana isn't convinced.

A common criticism is that practically everything in MobileMe is available elsewhere for free or at low cost. But let's look at that more closely.

First, mail. Yep, you can get ad-supported email for free. Gmail's one example, and it offers POP, IMAP and web mail access. But what about iPhone access? As I understand it, you can configure the iPhone's mail client to use Gmail and other services, but you don't get push. For that, you either need MobileMe or an Exchange account.

Hosted Exchange accounts are available, but the cheapest I've seen cost $US6 per month. Let's call it $A75 a year, but you could easily pay more. If you want mail storage measured in gigabytes rather than hundreds of megabytes, think about doubling that price.

$119 minus $75 leaves $44.

Time to add iDisk to the equation. WebDAV is a much more convenient protocol for online storage than messing with FTP or using a web browser to upload and download files. Some hosting plans do include WebDAV access, and you can get small amounts of WebDAV storage for free (eg at Box - open a free 1G account at www.box.net, then in the Finder select Go->Connect to Server and enter http://www.box.net/dav as the server address, the email address associated with the Box account as the username, and your password).

But if you want multiple gigabytes of storage - as provided by MobileMe - you can expect to spend more than $44 per year. A 15G Box account is just short of $240 a year. Admittedly, Box does deliver other services, but then so does MobileMe.

Still think MobileMe is expensive? That $119 subscription is already delivering services that could easily cost nearly three times more elsewhere.

My position on .Mac hasn't changed since the metamorphosis into MobileMe. If you can get all the features you need for free elsewhere, that's fine. So if all you want is an ISP-independent email address and a little online storage, you're laughing.

But completely replicating MobileMe's features (to the extent that it is possible, given the integration with various Mac applications such as iWeb and iPhoto) will cost real money.

The trick is to work out what you actually want or need, and then decide whether or not MobileMe delivers those features at a competitive and cost-effective price. Even if you can assemble a bundle of services from various providers that fits your needs at a slightly lower cost, is it worth messing around with multiple transactions to save a few dollars?

If you know good, cheap (or free) providers for components of MobileMe, please tell us about them in a comment.

PS: If calendars are your thing, note that Google Calendar now has built-in CalDAV support allowing synchronisation with iCal.