Apparently, Microsoft only supports users from Australia

[ritaxis]

It happened again last night --- I went to bed with programs open so I could work on them in the morning. This morning I wake up to all the programs gone and all my internet logins wiped (nobody else uses this computer so I stay logged in at the places that are the most pain in the ass to log in or that I visit frquently throughout the day) and who knows what other damage.

Microsoft tells me, on the one hand, that the system has recovered from a serious error, and in another popup, that it has just updated. This is in spite of the fact that my settings are for no automatic updates. Just because this is what happens with automatic updates.

So I went to complain and maybe get a pointer on how to get the system to believe that I really, really refuse automatic updates, that I can very well update on my own, that I really really don't want an outside party messing with my stuff. Every link I find takes me to Australia. What? None of these links are any good anyway, as none of them give me an actual email form to make my complaint in. There is a "virtual chat" which is actually the closest thing to a help topics index, but all it does is throw you a bunch of increasingly irrelevant topics that you're expected to choose from. It is not a chat as there is nobody on the other side. It's all chaotic, and, well, I have Xp Pro, which puts me what, three? four? operating systems behind?

I'm not getting the newest operating system. If I had enough money for a new operating system, I'd get my dog some medical care. Or me. Or pay my property taxes. Because the programs I use are all old except for firefox and photoshop and honestly I don't use photoshop as often as paintshop 9, and I don't want new programs that don't do what I want to do, not to speak of the hundreds of dollars involved in replacing them, or the fact that some of them are irreplaceable.

Meanwhile, I have to find out the extent of the damage cause by this iatrogenic crash, and spend about an hour extra getting everything started all over again.

Comments

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Does the update history show an actual update was applied?

[ellarien]

I think there may have been something a bit dodgy about this recent update -- it was obviously something they felt was important enough to push off-schedule, so it may not have been as thoroughly tested. My laptop went funny when I postponed rebooting because I was working, and I had to reboot anyway. I haven't tried it on the other machines yet, because the desktop is quite happy in Linux mode at the moment and the XP netbook hasn't been in use this week -- I'll try to remember to be careful when I do update it.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

And, in fact, Windows had turned on the most robust version of Automatic Updates. Why bother even having a setting if it's not going to be respected?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Linux is much more like a real operating system these days and has all the programs you run, and it is all free.

It would be perfectly reasonable if you don't want to pay the time/effort, but I've been running XUbuntu for ages now without any of this kind of problems.