(Having a bit of a rant-come-grumble, a rumble perhaps, but at least there are some nice Symi photos from Neil to brighten things up.) Well, I’m having great fun here on a Monday afternoon trying to set up the new laptop with Microsoft Office. I am typing away on the ‘old’ machine while having an online chat with a virtual person on the new one. It’s no wonder people go for pirate products these days, Microsoft thinks it knows you and actually it hasn’t got a clue.
I’m mainly rabbiting about the way the new laptop has a ‘thing’ that says ‘Office’ and, when you click it, it tells you that you haven’t got Office (which I kind of realised thanks) and would you like to buy it? So you think, ‘Well, yes I should really,’ and so you look at the amount they want, grumble a bit and then see that it comes with online storage and a few other things to lessen the blow and at least you know that you’re going to get the real deal and will get support if needed….
And talking of support I just had to break off to move over to the other machine to reply to an answer. You see, when my know-it-all machine takes me to where I can buy Office, it believes that because I am in Greece (which I assume it knows from my IP address, or from the built in camera which is being used to spy on me perhaps) that I can read Greek, fluently. So, I don’t want to download and pay for Office only to find out the it’s all in Greek. I’m not that clever!
Anyway, as I’ve been chatting to you, Christina B. up there in virtual land has been helping me out and we managed to deduce that I can put Office into English though I have to download it all in Greek, through the Greek pages, as IT knows what’s best for me. And then we figured out that although I signed up for a Microsoft account the other day it’s already lost me and I had to reset my password again, which is actually the second time I’ve had to do that since I was forced to sign up with them – I do hate the way they are taking over my life –and I knew I had the correct password because I wrote it in a secure place and left it right there next to my machine where I wouldn’t lose it.
The upshot is, 45 minutes later, that I am about to pay €69.00 for the basics I need to be able to write on a laptop, I am sorely tempted to find a pirate version of it as that €69.00 is only going to be for one year and then they will automatically rebill me next February, so I still haven’t pressed that button yet. In fact, I might just leave it hanging there…
No, I went and pressed the button in the end and now I’m waiting for it to do something. And while I am waiting I’ll finish this post then go and put my feet up while it downloads. But no, there’s a catch. ‘We have received you order and it may take 4-6 hours to process and charge… Once completed we will send you an email with the download information.’ And I assume you will be sending this to the inbox of Outlook that I don’t actually have on the computer yet as you’ve not sent it to me ‘cos I only just bought it…? Luckily I have this machine still running though I myself am running out of patience.
