Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Gypsies, tramps and thieves

My husband bought a laptop not too long ago, and Bill Gates' newest thing is to make you have a Microsoft email account that you have to sign into before you can use the newest Windows product.  Since the only account my hubby had was a Hotmail, it was used on the new laptop.  When he clicks the "mail" button on the Windows 8 start screen, it's SUPPOSED to bring him to his Hotmail account and let him see his new emails.

He doesn't use his laptop much because Lenovo seems to have a problem with not shutting itself off when the user is busily checking emails, surfing the web - and even in the middle of typing, as I discovered when trying to help him out by going through his settings to make it stop shutting itself off randomly.  (He's been an HVAC Technician for almost 30 years, but he rarely uses a computer, so I'm more of a geek than he is.  We have a little joke about me being his IT Tech here in our house.....)

SOMEHOW, even with as seldom as he uses it, Hotmail has decided he's having a security issue, and it keeps insisting that it needs to send him a security code so that he can retrieve his emails on his laptop.  (He can access the same email account from my laptop, from our desktop, from his phone, but Lenovo and Microsoft seem to have teamed up to have this "security issue" for him, making him miss a lot of important emails when he tries to check it on his laptop.)  The only problem with them sending him a security code is that they INSIST they have to send it to an email for our former internet provider, which we can no longer access, and that it can't be done RIGHT NOW - it has to happen in a month!

This little minion from Despicable Me has my reaction to that:

http://youtu.be/v0245xP_HVk

So I try to help him out by getting onto the phone with Microsoft.  It was like one of those scenes from a comedy routine, as the man I get on the phone has a very heavy accent and a middle eastern name, and while I'm trying to get them to just help me remove the defunct email account so that his "security code" can go to an email he can actually access, this guy is showing me a bunch of errors in which the Microsoft programs that are supposed to be running in the background are shutting down.  Funny thing, but my Dell laptop has the same programs shutting down in the background.

Of course, this ISN'T a Microsoft issue.  It must be something we're doing on the laptops.  Microsoft, according to every tech from Microsoft I've ever spoken to DOESN'T program in things to fail on system A so that, in a couple of years when they come out with system B, you will go out an buy it to get rid of the issues you've been having with system A.

Of course not.  That's why every IT tech at every company I've ever worked for can tell me exactly which spots Microsoft programmers have programmed to fail.

Needless to say, in order to get rid of this security problem and have the computers "fixed" for the next year, it's going to cost us money.  They can't just correct the email address on the account to allow a security code to be mailed to a functioning email address next month to allow my husband to access his account and actually get the emails that his friends and customers send him.

Do I need to post the minion link again to illustrate my reaction to the amount of money it's going to take for this?

Suffice to say that we aren't rolling in cash.  In fact, after the transmission fiasco with Chevrolet, we're trying to get my husband into a new truck, which means that in the next 6 years, we're going to have even less cash than we have right now.  We're going to be among those die-hards that still have Windows 8 on our computers when Microsoft decides they're no longer going to support Windows 8 because we aren't going to be able to afford all the "upgraded packages" that they'll come up with to fix the inherent problems with Windows 8.  (For that matter, I'll probably still be using the Windows 7 on my Dell laptop, as I can't even afford to put an office program on the desktop we had to replace because it was still running Windows XP and didn't have the memory functions to upgrade to 8, so I can't even do my writing on my desktop computer at the moment.)

SO glad that Bill Gates thinks everyone in America is just sitting on a stack of cash to pay him for this crap he keeps putting out......

*rolling my eyes so hard that I just found where that pea went that I stuck in my nose when I was 3*

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