GatewayRedbirds.com

I have to vent. I made the decision to go with the one time fee for Office for my travel laptop instead of the $100 a year. Don't know if that was best or not, and really don't care at this point.

Anyhoo...my wife went to install it last night and got to a point where it said there was an error and gave a number to call. Now, I don't know if she punched the key code in wrong or what, but don't care about that either. She calls and a guy tries to log on to our computer and after a half hour determines that our computer has a virus and our entire home network is infected. However, for a one time fix of $100 or a lifetime fix of $150, he would take care of it. I decided to bag it and take the computer back to OfficeMax and ask for money back or for them to do the computer check they do for free.

After all of 45 minutes on the phone I downloaded a couple of the good free virus detectors and turned windows defender (whatever that is) and no viruses were detected. So I tried one more time, and it worked!

So Microsoft had no problem asking me for a day's pay to fix...nothing.

FU Gates.

I so approve of this rant. Microsoft is s-hit. It always has been, it always will be. It's s-hit.

spent a good half hour trying to get Windows 10 out of airplane mode.

Freed Roger wrote:spent a good half hour trying to get Windows 10 out of airplane mode.

LOL. My dad's wifi connection stopped working a few months ago. He's computer illiterate and lives 5 hours away, so he called me and over the phone we went through all kinds of work arounds. Updated driver. Checked his device. Disabled and re-enabled it. Put it in airplane mode. Took it off airplane mode. Tried to connect him to other networks -- nothing. I even sent him to Best Buy to buy a new wifi router because we couldn't find anything to work on his computer. Plugged in the new router. He still had nothing. All of this happened over the course of 2 days!

Turns out at some point he had accidentally hit the wifi button on his keybord and it had turned off his wifi. There was no way to override that little button inside Windows 10. On his machine, if turn off your wifi on your keyboard it is off until you hit the keyboard button again. As soon as he pressed it again, everything came back on and worked perfectly. I couldn't believe it.

Fat Strat wrote:

Freed Roger wrote:spent a good half hour trying to get Windows 10 out of airplane mode.

Turns out at some point he had accidentally hit the wifi button on his keybord and it had turned off his wifi. There was no way to override that little button inside Windows 10. On his machine, if turn off your wifi on your keyboard it is off until you hit the keyboard button again. As soon as he pressed it again, everything came back on and worked perfectly. I couldn't believe it.

I'll keep that in mind. It's my kid's machine, and the few times I used it, I think I kept having to reconnect to wifi for reasons unbeknownst.

This appears to be a new tech support scam. My mom called Brother about a malfunctioning printer that was making a funny noise. They claimed it was a virus and wanted 150 dollars. My mom calls me about it and I know I put a good virus protection system on there. I tell her to take a closer look at the printer and it turns out the printer just had a small piece of paper jamming it.

Yeah, I have a feeling that you didn't call an actual Microsoft affiliated tech support and some scammer just happened to hijack your computer enough to get that message up there and stop the installation.

I found out on Christmas Eve that my mom got caught up in a similar scam. She had been paying them monthly for nearly two years when I broke it to her that she was the victim of a scam. She only mentioned it to me because she tried to cancel the service and they told her that if she did, they'd have to wipe her hard drive.

I had something pop up on my work computer one time. I just immediately held down the power button to shut it down and have never seen anything since.

I didn't read his original post carefully ... yeah this is a scam.

But I still maintain that Microsoft is ultimately at fault, because their software is so freaking easy to do this stuff to.

google chrome isn't working for me right now for some reason, so I was forced open Microsoft explorer. good lord I was reminded of why I never this clunky pos (to be fair chrome is pretty clunky too and eats up so many system resources, but at least it's not badgering me to download the chrome OS!!!!).

Microsoft, ive noticed, for the most part bullies you into downloading their software and it's quite annoying.