Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Back from internet death.

The message on my Windows 7 machine on November 19 when I turned it on was “Group policy client service failed login. Access denied.” Thus began the familiar pointless recourse to Microsoft repair and restore options that historically have proved to provide illusory or short-term relief. My anti-virus program kept “turning off” just prior to this nine-car pileup and there were interminable waits for “program not responding.” I won’t name the A/V vendor as I am not sure my problems can fairly be laid at its feet. My annual payment to MS for tech support resulted only in their advice to make a clean re-install of Windows 7. Again, I don’t fault that advice as not every problem with Windows of whatever flavor is resolvable by a minor though magical tweak.

I resolved to re-install and then upgrade to Windows 10 which I failed to do when it was free for reasons that escape me now but probably the word “obtuse” covers all the bases. "Stupid" also comes to mind. 10 seems like a good version and hopefully MS told it like it is when they said this is the last “version” of Windows. Since upgrade it’s been the classic misery of reinstalling program and transferring settings, macros, and styles. Thanksgiving came along but it’s been a week-long exercise in getting back to where I was.

Btw, I decided to install Word 2007, which I’d bought as insurance a while back. I liked the ribbon but it seemed unable to handle long documents and started misbehaving by showing me every revision I’d made since the fall of Corregidor. I ditched that and went back to the tank-like Word 2003 which works fine under 10. I lost my auto-correct trove and at this point don’t care to get them back. No great loss but certainly a part of the aggro.

2 comments:

  1. Ed BonderenkaNovember 29, 2017 at 2:19 PM

    I did the free upgrade to our office computer as a test before committing to the others. Did not do the others soon enough, but when the hard drive crashed, I had to revert to Win7. MS would not give me the free upgrade again, even though I'd taken it before.

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  2. Col. B. BunnyNovember 30, 2017 at 10:04 PM

    I'll give MS its due in offering it free in the first place but it does seem a little chicken to deny you the chance to reinstall. I'm sure they know your shoe size so it's unlikely they were unaware you'd made the initial download.

    MS is going to an annual license for Word users other than Joe Blow at home and students. The lucky subset get the install software I gather but it you want updates you have to buy next year's version at full price. Well, we'll see how their new business model goes. There's always WordPerfect, my original favorite that got way too complex for my blood (at least after being away from it for a long while). Too, there's the generic word processor software that's not bad at all. I push Word a tiny bit but am far from needing all the bells and whistles.

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