Microsoft 'support' goes off the deep end

A friend of mine just related his latest experience with Microsoft
non-support.

So he has an older laptop, a Dell (I know, but it was cheap, he’s getting a
real laptop during the sales they’re gonna have in January) which shipped
with Win 10 Home. And 4 GB RAM. And a 5400 rpm hard drive. And a i3. (It was
_that_ cheap.) He’s maxed the RAM. (8 whole GB...) and replaced the hard
drive with an SSD. Can’t do anything about the CPU, that’s soldered down.
Next up: do something about Win 10 Home. Microsoft says that uping to Pro
will cost $100, which is NOT going to happen. He has access (legal access,
he’s an IT instructor at a local school...) to the OnTheHub Microsoft site,
which has, among other things, Office 2019 Education (not, repeat, NOT Office
365) for $15 and Windows 10 Education also for $15. Office Education is
effectively Office Professional Plus, the full deal with all Office
components not named Project and Visio; Project and Visio are available as
separate downloads, for free. His old Office 2013 install bites the big one,
he gets Project and Visio, and then he gets Windows 10 Education. Windows
Education is, effectively, Enterprise. The download and update run smooth and
easy. Everything’s beautiful. Except... the taskbar is an irritating light
blue. Okay, that’s fixable. Settings/Personalize/Colors... ooh, the
checkbox is grayed out, it can’t be changed. And there the odyssey begins.

Settings can’t be run as Administrator, or maybe it always runs as
Administrator.

Group Policy doesn’t show anything useful.

The obvious registry values don’t have the desired effect (notes were taken
about the effects they do have)

He calls Microsoft Support. After being transferred multiple times, having
the call dropped twice, and finally getting to a ’supervisor’ (yeah,
right) it turns out that Microsoft _consumer_ Support can’t help, he needs
to talk to _business_ support. No, they can’t transfer the call. No, they
can’t give a case number that’ll work there. No, he can’t call, he has
to go to a specific site, which turns out to be the ‘create a support
request’ page. Creating a _business_ support request involves forking over
a lot of information and... $500. That’s Five Hundred Dollars. The cheap
Dell laptop didn’t cost that much in the first place.

He calls Support back and while he’s being told that consumer support
cannot assist him because Win 10 Education is really Win 10 Enterprise, which
is bull**** as he’s had assistance from MS Support when running previous
versions of Education. Win 7 Education, Win 8.1 Education, even Vista
Education, he does what he should have done in the first place: he Googles
it. (Well, he uses DuckDuckGo, but close enough) It turns out that this is a
very common problem, and goes back to at least March, and that there’s a
fix. Which takes literally 10 seconds to run.

Microsoft Support, talking to an instructor who has free/cheap access to MS
goodies so that he can indoctrinate the kiddies, _knowing_ that they’re
talking to an instructor, go out of their way to jerk him around and to try
to extract cash for a problem Microsoft created thanks to a known bug which
hasn’t been officially fixed and for which there has been an unofficial fix
since late March.

That new machine he gets in January will be either a Mac or will have Linux
on it.

Nice going, there, guys.

On 11/17/19 5:28 PM, Wolffan wrote:
A friend of mine just related his latest experience with Microsoft
non-support.

So he has an older laptop, a Dell (I know, but it was cheap, he’s getting a
real laptop during the sales they’re gonna have in January) which shipped
with Win 10 Home. And 4 GB RAM. And a 5400 rpm hard drive. And a i3. (It was
_that_ cheap.) He’s maxed the RAM. (8 whole GB...) and replaced the hard
drive with an SSD. Can’t do anything about the CPU, that’s soldered down.
Next up: do something about Win 10 Home. Microsoft says that uping to Pro
will cost $100, which is NOT going to happen. He has access (legal access,
he’s an IT instructor at a local school...) to the OnTheHub Microsoft site,
which has, among other things, Office 2019 Education (not, repeat, NOT Office
365) for $15 and Windows 10 Education also for $15. Office Education is
effectively Office Professional Plus, the full deal with all Office
components not named Project and Visio; Project and Visio are available as
separate downloads, for free. His old Office 2013 install bites the big one,
he gets Project and Visio, and then he gets Windows 10 Education. Windows
Education is, effectively, Enterprise. The download and update run smooth and
easy. Everything’s beautiful. Except... the taskbar is an irritating light
blue. Okay, that’s fixable. Settings/Personalize/Colors... ooh, the
checkbox is grayed out, it can’t be changed. And there the odyssey begins.

Settings can’t be run as Administrator, or maybe it always runs as
Administrator.

Group Policy doesn’t show anything useful.

The obvious registry values don’t have the desired effect (notes were taken
about the effects they do have)

He calls Microsoft Support. After being transferred multiple times, having
the call dropped twice, and finally getting to a ’supervisor’ (yeah,
right) it turns out that Microsoft _consumer_ Support can’t help, he needs
to talk to _business_ support. No, they can’t transfer the call. No, they
can’t give a case number that’ll work there. No, he can’t call, he has
to go to a specific site, which turns out to be the ‘create a support
request’ page. Creating a _business_ support request involves forking over
a lot of information and... $500. That’s Five Hundred Dollars. The cheap
Dell laptop didn’t cost that much in the first place.

He calls Support back and while he’s being told that consumer support
cannot assist him because Win 10 Education is really Win 10 Enterprise, which
is bull**** as he’s had assistance from MS Support when running previous
versions of Education. Win 7 Education, Win 8.1 Education, even Vista
Education, he does what he should have done in the first place: he Googles
it. (Well, he uses DuckDuckGo, but close enough) It turns out that this is a
very common problem, and goes back to at least March, and that there’s a
fix. Which takes literally 10 seconds to run.

Microsoft Support, talking to an instructor who has free/cheap access to MS
goodies so that he can indoctrinate the kiddies, _knowing_ that they’re
talking to an instructor, go out of their way to jerk him around and to try
to extract cash for a problem Microsoft created thanks to a known bug which
hasn’t been officially fixed and for which there has been an unofficial fix
since late March.

That new machine he gets in January will be either a Mac or will have Linux
on it.

Nice going, there, guys.


Hi Wolffan,

Every time I have had to deal with M$, I have felt
quite homicidal. I feel your pain.

If you decide to go Linux, you can download various
desktops spins and try them out from a flash drive.
Try before you buy.

https://spins.fedoraproject.org/

They cut with dd. If you are in Windows, you
can cut them with Fedora Media Writer for Windows:

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2...sb-boot-media/

There is a Linux version of the above too, but I just use dd


Xfce is my favorite. It is stripped and gets out of
your way. I despise OS'es designed as an amusement park.

KDE is what Window 7 was based on and is very, very
similar to Windows 7.

GNome is weird. But is also kind of fun when you
get use to it.

-T

Wolffan wrote:
A friend of mine just related his latest experience with Microsoft
non-support.

So he has an older laptop, a Dell (I know, but it was cheap, he’s getting a
real laptop during the sales they’re gonna have in January) which shipped
with Win 10 Home. And 4 GB RAM. And a 5400 rpm hard drive. And a i3. (It was
_that_ cheap.) He’s maxed the RAM. (8 whole GB...) and replaced the hard
drive with an SSD. Can’t do anything about the CPU, that’s soldered down.
Next up: do something about Win 10 Home. Microsoft says that uping to Pro
will cost $100, which is NOT going to happen. He has access (legal access,
he’s an IT instructor at a local school...) to the OnTheHub Microsoft site,
which has, among other things, Office 2019 Education (not, repeat, NOT Office
365) for $15 and Windows 10 Education also for $15. Office Education is
effectively Office Professional Plus, the full deal with all Office
components not named Project and Visio; Project and Visio are available as
separate downloads, for free. His old Office 2013 install bites the big one,
he gets Project and Visio, and then he gets Windows 10 Education. Windows
Education is, effectively, Enterprise. The download and update run smooth and
easy. Everything’s beautiful. Except... the taskbar is an irritating light
blue. Okay, that’s fixable. Settings/Personalize/Colors... ooh, the
checkbox is grayed out, it can’t be changed. And there the odyssey begins.

Settings can’t be run as Administrator, or maybe it always runs as
Administrator.

Group Policy doesn’t show anything useful.

The obvious registry values don’t have the desired effect (notes were taken
about the effects they do have)

He calls Microsoft Support. After being transferred multiple times, having
the call dropped twice, and finally getting to a ’supervisor’ (yeah,
right) it turns out that Microsoft _consumer_ Support can’t help, he needs
to talk to _business_ support. No, they can’t transfer the call. No, they
can’t give a case number that’ll work there. No, he can’t call, he has
to go to a specific site, which turns out to be the ‘create a support
request’ page. Creating a _business_ support request involves forking over
a lot of information and... $500. That’s Five Hundred Dollars. The cheap
Dell laptop didn’t cost that much in the first place.

He calls Support back and while he’s being told that consumer support
cannot assist him because Win 10 Education is really Win 10 Enterprise, which
is bull**** as he’s had assistance from MS Support when running previous
versions of Education. Win 7 Education, Win 8.1 Education, even Vista
Education, he does what he should have done in the first place: he Googles
it. (Well, he uses DuckDuckGo, but close enough) It turns out that this is a
very common problem, and goes back to at least March, and that there’s a
fix. Which takes literally 10 seconds to run.

Microsoft Support, talking to an instructor who has free/cheap access to MS
goodies so that he can indoctrinate the kiddies, _knowing_ that they’re
talking to an instructor, go out of their way to jerk him around and to try
to extract cash for a problem Microsoft created thanks to a known bug which
hasn’t been officially fixed and for which there has been an unofficial fix
since late March.

That new machine he gets in January will be either a Mac or will have Linux
on it.

Nice going, there, guys.


I just researched it, and there is practically no way to get an
Education edition for Windows 10, where the school IT department
isn't your "support contact". You're not supposed to phone
Microsoft for that. If you have a Windows 10 Education question,
it goes to your IT department. And they escalate if they cannot
solve the problem.

The older versions were different.

Microsoft fired their head of marketing/sales, when the new
guy that wears Dockers took over. It was originally expected
whatever replacement they hired, would simplify things.
Wrong-O. It's worse now.

To get Windows 10 Education:

"now part of Microsoft Azure DevTools for Teaching"

Sample school page, where the school describes to the
ecosystem, who qualifies and so on. This would be a school
which bought into the hype.

https://www.queensu.ca/its/software/...s-10-education

The second mechanism, is discount licenses as part of
hardware purchases for K-12. Which again, puts either
the OEM of that hardware on the hook for support
(Lenovo), or the local IT department (who own the K-12
machines) are on the hook for support.

A suspicious person would naturally ask, how this copy
of Education was acquired, and why the person acquiring
it was not familiar with the T & C webpage at school.

You can see in the user comment section of this page, a large
number of people don't get it. They're not aware the new
T & C is entirely different. If your school doesn't buy
the DevTools package, no "freebie" for you etc.

https://onthehub.com/download/free-s...-for-students/

Paul

A right load of Hogwash, eh? :-D

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hogwash


=


Ref: Header info: User-Agent: Hogwasher/5.24

Btw, I don't trust the word of those who use news.mixmin.net

Is this REALLY you? http://news.mixmin.net/banana/aboutme.html

On 18 Nov 2019, Paul wrote
(in article ):

Wolffan wrote:
A friend of mine just related his latest experience with Microsoft
non-support.

So he has an older laptop, a Dell (I know, but it was cheap, he’s getting
a
real laptop during the sales they’re gonna have in January) which shipped
with Win 10 Home. And 4 GB RAM. And a 5400 rpm hard drive. And a i3. (It was
_that_ cheap.) He’s maxed the RAM. (8 whole GB...) and replaced the hard
drive with an SSD. Can’t do anything about the CPU, that’s soldered
down.
Next up: do something about Win 10 Home. Microsoft says that uping to Pro
will cost $100, which is NOT going to happen. He has access (legal access,
he’s an IT instructor at a local school...) to the OnTheHub Microsoft
site,
which has, among other things, Office 2019 Education (not, repeat, NOT
Office
365) for $15 and Windows 10 Education also for $15. Office Education is
effectively Office Professional Plus, the full deal with all Office
components not named Project and Visio; Project and Visio are available as
separate downloads, for free. His old Office 2013 install bites the big one,
he gets Project and Visio, and then he gets Windows 10 Education. Windows
Education is, effectively, Enterprise. The download and update run smooth
and
easy. Everything’s beautiful. Except... the taskbar is an irritating light
blue. Okay, that’s fixable. Settings/Personalize/Colors... ooh, the
checkbox is grayed out, it can’t be changed. And there the odyssey begins.

Settings can’t be run as Administrator, or maybe it always runs as
Administrator.

Group Policy doesn’t show anything useful.

The obvious registry values don’t have the desired effect (notes were
taken
about the effects they do have)

He calls Microsoft Support. After being transferred multiple times, having
the call dropped twice, and finally getting to a ’supervisor’ (yeah,
right) it turns out that Microsoft _consumer_ Support can’t help, he needs
to talk to _business_ support. No, they can’t transfer the call. No, they
can’t give a case number that’ll work there. No, he can’t call, he has
to go to a specific site, which turns out to be the ‘create a support
request’ page. Creating a _business_ support request involves forking over
a lot of information and... $500. That’s Five Hundred Dollars. The cheap
Dell laptop didn’t cost that much in the first place.

He calls Support back and while he’s being told that consumer support
cannot assist him because Win 10 Education is really Win 10 Enterprise,
which
is bull**** as he’s had assistance from MS Support when running previous
versions of Education. Win 7 Education, Win 8.1 Education, even Vista
Education, he does what he should have done in the first place: he Googles
it. (Well, he uses DuckDuckGo, but close enough) It turns out that this is a
very common problem, and goes back to at least March, and that there’s a
fix. Which takes literally 10 seconds to run.

Microsoft Support, talking to an instructor who has free/cheap access to MS
goodies so that he can indoctrinate the kiddies, _knowing_ that they’re
talking to an instructor, go out of their way to jerk him around and to try
to extract cash for a problem Microsoft created thanks to a known bug which
hasn’t been officially fixed and for which there has been an unofficial
fix
since late March.

That new machine he gets in January will be either a Mac or will have Linux
on it.

Nice going, there, guys.

I just researched it, and there is practically no way to get an
Education edition for Windows 10, where the school IT department
isn't your "support contact".

In this case he just went to the OnTheHub page, selected Win10 Education,
downloaded, and installed. No contact whatsoever with school IT. That’s the
way he got Vista, and 7, and 8.1 Education. He’s _never_ had to involve
school IT, not on his own machines. On _school_ machines, that’s different.
He made sure to let Microsoft support know that this was his personal
machine, not a school system, the same as he’s always done.
You're not supposed to phone
Microsoft for that. If you have a Windows 10 Education question,
it goes to your IT department. And they escalate if they cannot
solve the problem.

The older versions were different.

Ah. Someone hasn’t passed the word to either OnTheHub or to school IT...


Microsoft fired their head of marketing/sales, when the new
guy that wears Dockers took over. It was originally expected
whatever replacement they hired, would simplify things.
Wrong-O. It's worse now.

To get Windows 10 Education:

"now part of Microsoft Azure DevTools for Teaching"

Nah. Just go to OnTheHub. You go to Azure _if you have a school device which
is controlled and administered by the school_. Not your own device.


Sample school page, where the school describes to the
ecosystem, who qualifies and so on. This would be a school
which bought into the hype.

https://www.queensu.ca/its/software/...s-10-education

The second mechanism, is discount licenses as part of
hardware purchases for K-12. Which again, puts either
the OEM of that hardware on the hook for support
(Lenovo), or the local IT department (who own the K-12
machines) are on the hook for support.

A suspicious person would naturally ask, how this copy
of Education was acquired, and why the person acquiring
it was not familiar with the T & C webpage at school.

By going to OnTheHub and signing in and paying $15 and downloading it.



You can see in the user comment section of this page, a large
number of people don't get it. They're not aware the new
T & C is entirely different. If your school doesn't buy
the DevTools package, no "freebie" for you etc.

https://onthehub.com/download/free-s...-for-students/

yep, that’s where he got it.



Paul

On Mon, 18 Nov 2019 03:06:19 +0000, ? Good Guy ?
wrote:

On 18/11/2019 01:28, Wolffan wrote:
A friend of mine just related his latest experience with Microsoft
non-support.


Your friend is a loser and and a person of low intelligence

I doubt he's stupid enough to buy one of your "real" US$10 Win
10 enterprise "licenses" though.
Or pay for your "support" which requires installing a "guest
account with administrator privileges" so you can "fix it remotely".
What is your scam, I mean "support" phone number anyway?
The AV guys need it for some reason I can't fathom.
[]'s


--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012

On 11/17/19 11:12 PM, T wrote:
On 11/17/19 5:28 PM, Wolffan wrote:
A friend of mine just related his latest experience with Microsoft
non-support.

So he has an older laptop, a Dell (I know, but it was cheap, he’s
getting a
real laptop during the sales they’re gonna have in January) which shipped
with Win 10 Home. And 4 GB RAM. And a 5400 rpm hard drive. And a i3.
(It was
_that_ cheap.) He’s maxed the RAM. (8 whole GB...) and replaced the hard
drive with an SSD. Can’t do anything about the CPU, that’s soldered down.
Next up: do something about Win 10 Home. Microsoft says that uping to Pro
will cost $100, which is NOT going to happen. He has access (legal
access,
he’s an IT instructor at a local school...) to the OnTheHub Microsoft
site,
which has, among other things, Office 2019 Education (not, repeat, NOT
Office
365) for $15 and Windows 10 Education also for $15. Office Education is
effectively Office Professional Plus, the full deal with all Office
components not named Project and Visio; Project and Visio are
available as
separate downloads, for free. His old Office 2013 install bites the
big one,
he gets Project and Visio, and then he gets Windows 10 Education. Windows
Education is, effectively, Enterprise. The download and update run
smooth and
easy. Everything’s beautiful. Except... the taskbar is an irritating
light
blue. Okay, that’s fixable. Settings/Personalize/Colors... ooh, the
checkbox is grayed out, it can’t be changed. And there the odyssey
begins.

Settings can’t be run as Administrator, or maybe it always runs as
Administrator.

Group Policy doesn’t show anything useful.

The obvious registry values don’t have the desired effect (notes were
taken
about the effects they do have)

He calls Microsoft Support. After being transferred multiple times,
having
the call dropped twice, and finally getting to a ’supervisor’ (yeah,
right) it turns out that Microsoft _consumer_ Support can’t help, he
needs
to talk to _business_ support. No, they can’t transfer the call. No, they
can’t give a case number that’ll work there. No, he can’t call, he has
to go to a specific site, which turns out to be the ‘create a support
request’ page. Creating a _business_ support request involves forking
over
a lot of information and... $500. That’s Five Hundred Dollars. The cheap
Dell laptop didn’t cost that much in the first place.

He calls Support back and while he’s being told that consumer support
cannot assist him because Win 10 Education is really Win 10
Enterprise, which
is bull**** as he’s had assistance from MS Support when running previous
versions of Education. Win 7 Education, Win 8.1 Education, even Vista
Education, he does what he should have done in the first place: he
Googles
it. (Well, he uses DuckDuckGo, but close enough) It turns out that
this is a
very common problem, and goes back to at least March, and that there’s a
fix. Which takes literally 10 seconds to run.

Microsoft Support, talking to an instructor who has free/cheap access
to MS
goodies so that he can indoctrinate the kiddies, _knowing_ that they’re
talking to an instructor, go out of their way to jerk him around and
to try
to extract cash for a problem Microsoft created thanks to a known bug
which
hasn’t been officially fixed and for which there has been an
unofficial fix
since late March.

That new machine he gets in January will be either a Mac or will have
Linux
on it.

Nice going, there, guys.


Hi Wolffan,

Every time I have had to deal with M$, I have felt
quite homicidal.Â* I feel your pain.

If you decide to go Linux, you can download various
desktops spins and try them out from a flash drive.
Try before you buy.

https://spins.fedoraproject.org/

They cut with dd.Â* If you are in Windows, you
can cut them with Fedora Media Writer for Windows:

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2...sb-boot-media/


There is a Linux version of the above too, but I just use dd


Xfce is my favorite.Â* It is stripped and gets out of
your way.Â* I despise OS'es designed as an amusement park.

KDE is what Window 7 was based on and is very, very
similar to Windows 7.

GNome is weird.Â* But is also kind of fun when you
get use to it.

-T

Odd, I always say that Linux Mint Cinnamon is much like Windows 7.

Al

On 11/18/19 6:12 AM, Big Al wrote:
Odd,Â*IÂ*alwaysÂ*sayÂ*thatÂ*LinuxÂ*MintÂ*Cinnamon *isÂ*muchÂ*likeÂ*WindowsÂ*7.

Check out one of the KDE live spins. It is eerie how
close it is to w7.

Haven't used Mint. Which desktop does it primarily use?