Windows 10 Fun
Come on Microsoft, you can do better than this!
A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, I mentioned that I was having problems activating Windows 10 on one of my systems after I upgraded the CPU, motherboard, RAM, and graphics card. I was tempted to install Ubuntu, but as a last ditch effort (and on the advice of one of our calmer readers), I elected to get in touch with a Microsoft support engineer first.
One option is to chat with the engineer using a messaging app, and that’s the one I went for. This turned out to be a good choice, because it allowed me to check off various activation codes without having to read out the 25-digit digits over the phone. It also meant he could check a few things using a remote desktop connection, to help confirm that I wasn’t trying to pull a fast one.
The guy I dealt with was calm, clear, and very helpful. And I did eventually end up with an activated copy of Windows 10, though it did take a long time due to the machine in question—a PC that can trace its origins back to a pre-built system from a now defunct system builder. Even though the engineer managed to sort me out in the end, the situation is still ridiculous.
In order to activate the machine, I had to trawl through several Windows codes, some upgrades to existing operating systems, others less obvious, until I ended up with an old Windows 7 code I had emailed myself seven years ago. When I did copy and paste this across to the engineer, he initially said that it had already been upgraded to Windows 10 ( which is obvious, given that’s what was running on the machine before the upgrade), but once he’d taken control of my machine, and sorted a few keys out, I was good to go. So am I now back on Microsoft’s side? Not quite. While I understand that Microsoft has to defend itself against pirates, having a system that tracks upgrades properly would have saved me many hours of effort. There was only ever one copy of Win 10 on that machine, and while it looks like it has the ability to keep track of that, the dots aren’t lining up yet.