I've not heard this one before, and as I'm still here and on the internet I'm presuming it's a scam.
I received a call and the guy on the phone knew who I was and my address (easy information to find), he claimed to be from Microsoft. He said that my Windows license had been compromised and was being used by others, as a result, Microsoft were going to cancel the license and provide me with another one.
He wanted to check my license, but I told him the PC was not on, and I wasn't prepared to wait 20 minutes for it to power up. I asked for my license key. He gave me 00C0 4FD7 B062. I was expecting five sets of five characters (a Microsoft Product Key), so was rather surprised to get something that looked for all the world like a MAC address.
I said I'd call back (I won't) and could he give me a number. He did: 1800 212-1199. I then gave him the go ahead to terminate the license. This number only returns Chinese/Japanese and Russian sites when put into Google.
He called from 02011123236 which seems to have a bit of a reputation for dodgy calls.
If you didn't know, it would have been easy to fall for this scam: he was polite, articulate and apparently helpful. My guess is that he would look at something on my PC and tell me that the licence I was using wasn't valid, and then charge me for a new one.
Microsoft OEM licenses are bound to the hardware, and if used on other machines will prevent Windows update and give you some very annoying nag screens. You may also lose your desktop background. I have never seen access to the internet disabled - that's what you need to resolve the issue.
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Monday, August 31, 2015
Monday, June 22, 2015
Veryan Day 3 - Ever Increasing Circles
As forecast, the day started wet and relatively cold. After breakfast, I completed yesterday's blog, and then started reading a book about Veryan. The weather seemed to clear, and we rushed to get ready and went out. Brody was relieved, but by the time he had finished it was raining again, so we returned to the cottage - total distance 0.09 km.
We had lunch relatively early, Jo cooked the Chicken Tikka she bought the other day, and with rice and stir-fry we were fuelled and ready for the afternoon walk. With the weather improving, we left about 13:20 to complete walk 9 in the booklet of walks. This one starts at Veryan, and goes through Trewartha and Portloe and then back. After a short break at the post office to write and send post cards, we returned to the route.
A theme of our walks has been the overly high stiles we have had to get across. Here is one that Jo started to cross, before we realised that the gate opened! There were some very high ones, and some of them we did not need to cross. The guided walk occasionally mixed it's left and right, so we went round in a couple of big circles. That means the directions cannot be trusted, so at one point we decided to go down to the coast, except we never got further than the coastal path, and in making that decision we completely missed Portloe. We then took a very long walk along the coastal path towards Carne Beach, turning away from the main costal path we ended up a little closer to home, which avoided the steep hill up from the beach. All the time the weather was improving, and my hat was still in the cottage. I could feel my head getting burnt.
Here is the route as recorded by Runtastic.
After a short rest and a long drink, we decided to go to The Ship Inn in Portloe. The food is very good, we both chose the plaice. I chose it because it was the healthiest option, until I saw just how much butter it had been cooked in. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. We drove onwards through Portloe on our way home and soon passed Broom Parc, the house where "The Camomile Lawn" was set. It is also the point at which we deviated from our route and ended up on a 10km hike.
Sitting here blogging, I thought I would back up the pictures on Jo's phone. On my 2 android devices, this has been simplicity itself. Plug it in, wait while the driver installs, look at the contents of the phone in explorer. So you might expect that a Windows laptop could talk to a Windows phone easily. You'd be wrong. The driver install failed. I have to install an 'app for desktop'. When installed, it first tries to sync all the photos on the Laptop to the phone. I stopped it, that would have been a disaster. I have now copied Jo's pictures to the Laptop, for safer keeping.
We had lunch relatively early, Jo cooked the Chicken Tikka she bought the other day, and with rice and stir-fry we were fuelled and ready for the afternoon walk. With the weather improving, we left about 13:20 to complete walk 9 in the booklet of walks. This one starts at Veryan, and goes through Trewartha and Portloe and then back. After a short break at the post office to write and send post cards, we returned to the route.
After a short rest and a long drink, we decided to go to The Ship Inn in Portloe. The food is very good, we both chose the plaice. I chose it because it was the healthiest option, until I saw just how much butter it had been cooked in. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. We drove onwards through Portloe on our way home and soon passed Broom Parc, the house where "The Camomile Lawn" was set. It is also the point at which we deviated from our route and ended up on a 10km hike.
Sitting here blogging, I thought I would back up the pictures on Jo's phone. On my 2 android devices, this has been simplicity itself. Plug it in, wait while the driver installs, look at the contents of the phone in explorer. So you might expect that a Windows laptop could talk to a Windows phone easily. You'd be wrong. The driver install failed. I have to install an 'app for desktop'. When installed, it first tries to sync all the photos on the Laptop to the phone. I stopped it, that would have been a disaster. I have now copied Jo's pictures to the Laptop, for safer keeping.
Friday, March 27, 2015
Washington Day 7 - Inhuman treatment
The blog titles seem a little heavy, but in a land where there's comparative freedom, it is important to remember times and places where that has not been the case.
We started the day with cold and rain, so after breakfast we stayed in and caught up with family at home.
For lunch, we went to TGIs, it was not a great experience. The TGIs atmosphere does not work at lunch times. The food was OK, if slightly on the expensive side, but we have had better. Robbie needed more sleep, so we didn't set off for Washington until 3pm.
Robert went to watch the Denmark vs USA football, the rest of us went to the holocaust museum. By the time we got there all the day's allocation of tickets for the main exhibition had been used. This was very disappointing. However, we could still visit the special exhibitions. These seemed dedicated to trying to answer the question "How could it have happened?" The answer seems to be that ordinary people are easily manipulated, succumb to their own greed easily without thinking of the consequences for others and generally live in fear of the authorities. Some, only a few, did not turn a blind eye, or passively participate, but that is not the story they are trying to tell. It was an upsetting show, I wonder what the effect of the main exhibition would have been. While I don't agree with Human Rights without Human Responsibilities, it is a better place to be than Nazi Germany, and means that such extremes are much harder to repeat.
We then walked up to the Washington monument, where there is little information on the outside. It is after 5pm now and the monument is closed. Why does it change colour about a third of the way up? It is an impressive stone tower, but without more context I cannot make any more comments.
For tea, we visited the Elephant and Castle. A busy English style pub, unfortunately the food was not great, mine was at best lukewarm and unevenly so. Others were also disappointed. The manager did sort out a couple of other complaints, in the usual way, but we won't be going back.
The extra sleep has worked for Robbie, he is having a great time waving at people and laughing and grinning to himself and us. I have been very impressed with the way people have responded to him. Always positive, and actively encouraging him.
On returning to the hotel I continued my blogging on a Microsoft Surface 2. When Karen set it up for me the Windows O/S has all the same problems as regular windows. I am using IE, and getting all sorts of blogger errors I have never seen before. The App store apparently only has one twitter client - the official one, which leaves a lot to be desired. It gets the job done, but it won't kill Android, so I doubt it will come close to competing with the iPad either.
We await Windows 10, with low expectations.
We started the day with cold and rain, so after breakfast we stayed in and caught up with family at home.
For lunch, we went to TGIs, it was not a great experience. The TGIs atmosphere does not work at lunch times. The food was OK, if slightly on the expensive side, but we have had better. Robbie needed more sleep, so we didn't set off for Washington until 3pm.
Robert went to watch the Denmark vs USA football, the rest of us went to the holocaust museum. By the time we got there all the day's allocation of tickets for the main exhibition had been used. This was very disappointing. However, we could still visit the special exhibitions. These seemed dedicated to trying to answer the question "How could it have happened?" The answer seems to be that ordinary people are easily manipulated, succumb to their own greed easily without thinking of the consequences for others and generally live in fear of the authorities. Some, only a few, did not turn a blind eye, or passively participate, but that is not the story they are trying to tell. It was an upsetting show, I wonder what the effect of the main exhibition would have been. While I don't agree with Human Rights without Human Responsibilities, it is a better place to be than Nazi Germany, and means that such extremes are much harder to repeat.
We then walked up to the Washington monument, where there is little information on the outside. It is after 5pm now and the monument is closed. Why does it change colour about a third of the way up? It is an impressive stone tower, but without more context I cannot make any more comments.
For tea, we visited the Elephant and Castle. A busy English style pub, unfortunately the food was not great, mine was at best lukewarm and unevenly so. Others were also disappointed. The manager did sort out a couple of other complaints, in the usual way, but we won't be going back.
The extra sleep has worked for Robbie, he is having a great time waving at people and laughing and grinning to himself and us. I have been very impressed with the way people have responded to him. Always positive, and actively encouraging him.
On returning to the hotel I continued my blogging on a Microsoft Surface 2. When Karen set it up for me the Windows O/S has all the same problems as regular windows. I am using IE, and getting all sorts of blogger errors I have never seen before. The App store apparently only has one twitter client - the official one, which leaves a lot to be desired. It gets the job done, but it won't kill Android, so I doubt it will come close to competing with the iPad either.
We await Windows 10, with low expectations.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Windows 7 - first brief look
On a pre-installed machine, but more of that later. So here are my first impressions. They can be summed up with the phrase "What a mess".
Now I know a lot of this stuff can be fixed, but it shouldn't need to be.
1) Translucent title bars are still in place. These are probably the daftest idea that Microsoft has ever had.
2) Shutdown, if you click it installs the updates - 15 in my case. Microsoft please note - I just want to go home, not wait for all these updates to install.
3) UAC messages are still apparent. I have only logged on and completed set up, and I've still had to confirm that I want to!
4) Coming out of Standby the screen doesn't show the red power off button until you click 'Switch User'. Then the same screen is displayed with it, but this time the option to install updates must be selected!!
5) I selected connect on the wireless network I wanted to connect to. It is WEP protected, so I expected a prompt for a key. Instead the system reported that there was a problem. I'm new to this O/S so took the decision to diagnose the problem. Lots of scanning and repairs later it still hadn't asked me for the key. In fact to put the key in I have to go into the control panel and navigate the unnecessary hierarchy of bits and bobs before I can enter the key. I typed it wrong the first time, but still no message saying, for example "access denied". Why ever not? They're fond enough of it elsewhere.
6) Start-up time is supposed to be improved - it isn't. I'm going to race it against my old Vista system to see who wins. Of my current machines the 4 year old XP is the fastest to a usable state (logged in).
My conclusion so far - this is Vista version 1.5. The rest is unjustified hype!
Now I know a lot of this stuff can be fixed, but it shouldn't need to be.
1) Translucent title bars are still in place. These are probably the daftest idea that Microsoft has ever had.
2) Shutdown, if you click it installs the updates - 15 in my case. Microsoft please note - I just want to go home, not wait for all these updates to install.
3) UAC messages are still apparent. I have only logged on and completed set up, and I've still had to confirm that I want to!
4) Coming out of Standby the screen doesn't show the red power off button until you click 'Switch User'. Then the same screen is displayed with it, but this time the option to install updates must be selected!!
5) I selected connect on the wireless network I wanted to connect to. It is WEP protected, so I expected a prompt for a key. Instead the system reported that there was a problem. I'm new to this O/S so took the decision to diagnose the problem. Lots of scanning and repairs later it still hadn't asked me for the key. In fact to put the key in I have to go into the control panel and navigate the unnecessary hierarchy of bits and bobs before I can enter the key. I typed it wrong the first time, but still no message saying, for example "access denied". Why ever not? They're fond enough of it elsewhere.
6) Start-up time is supposed to be improved - it isn't. I'm going to race it against my old Vista system to see who wins. Of my current machines the 4 year old XP is the fastest to a usable state (logged in).
My conclusion so far - this is Vista version 1.5. The rest is unjustified hype!
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Microsoft RANT
Apologies to all those who don't care, but please Bill can I have my PC back.
Before Windows/XP SP2, I used to get updates automatically downloaded, which was very nice, I could then look at them, in detail to find out what they fixed, and decide which to apply. Now I get a list, and NO detail of whats being fixed, and when I shut down it wants to apply them all. So I guess its back to the old 98 way - run the request and sit and wait for the download. More of SP2 turned off. All thats left is the dodgy firewall - Norton has dealt with the rest of it.
RANT 2 - Office
Why is it that a document e-mailed to 20 different people has characters in different fonts for some, but not others? Yes, there may be diferent versions, but have you ever heard of converters?
Time to move to Open Office - office for free.
Before Windows/XP SP2, I used to get updates automatically downloaded, which was very nice, I could then look at them, in detail to find out what they fixed, and decide which to apply. Now I get a list, and NO detail of whats being fixed, and when I shut down it wants to apply them all. So I guess its back to the old 98 way - run the request and sit and wait for the download. More of SP2 turned off. All thats left is the dodgy firewall - Norton has dealt with the rest of it.
RANT 2 - Office
Why is it that a document e-mailed to 20 different people has characters in different fonts for some, but not others? Yes, there may be diferent versions, but have you ever heard of converters?
Time to move to Open Office - office for free.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)