On Thu, 11 May 2017 19:19:31 -0400, Ken Hart
wrote:

On 05/11/2017 12:45 AM, Bill W wrote:
On Wed, 10 May 2017 23:31:40 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Bill W
wrote:

Well, I finally got my photo computer working again a little after I
hung up on MS customer support, and a little before I reached the bomb
threat level of frustration with them.

what does it take to move beyond threat level and actually carry it
out?

After they told me I had to pay them to tell me how to fix the problem
that *their* update caused, I was at the tipping point... And this was
after I told them exactly what was wrong - a munged boot sector. "Oh,
well at this level 1 customer support, no one knows anything about
MBR's and those things. You have to get that info at level 2, our paid
service".

customer support is mostly useless, and at the larger companies, they
just want to get you off the phone because they're rated on number of
calls.

It's almost exactly like ransomware, except that a lot of Googling
came up with a fix. About 10 commands (bootrec & diskpart commands)
typed into the command line - really about 60 seconds if you type
fast, and it's fixed. The ridiculous part is that the Windows
install/recovery files (Media creation files) come out differently
depending on whether you choose to write them to a USB drive, or to a
DVD. Some tools are missing in the USB version, and a couple of the
commands fail, the critical one being bcdboot.

welcome to windows.

One of the last things I said to them was, " I guess this is why
people move to Apple". It might be a couple of years, but next time I
think I need something new, I will be looking at them for the first
time.

There's always Linux...

I did consider that in the past, but I have a lot of software that is
not is not written for Linux, and a lot of files - especially music -
that can't be used in any Linux software. Linux is probably great for
browsing and email. Far less worry about viruses.