Anyone else get OneDrive prompts at almost every occasion you use a hard drive for the first time after you've turned the computer on? So almost immediately?

Don't know about that because I don't use it. But my dad has started calling me up complaining about Windows 10. He asked me yesterday what he could do to get rid of it. He wants to go back to Windows 7 but it doesn't look like there's an easy way to do that. I don't think his computer came with a restore CD/DVD and it certainly didn't come with a vanilla windows 7 CD/DVD. I offered to install linux and he was genuinely interested until I asked him if he used any sort of external hardware with his computer. It turns out he uses some sort of motorcycle GPS and associated program which 99.999% chance doesn't work with linux. Doesn't look like you can even buy Windows 7 anymore? ****ty situation to be in.

I also suggesting buying a mac since his computer is pretty dang old but he was scared off when I mentioned the 5-year lifetime (give or take), after which apple stops providing updates for the hardware (happened to me with one of the white plastic macbooks -- hardware worked fine but it stopped being able to update after snow leopard, which, by the way, was the only major operating system upgrade that was released after I bought it, so that was pretty ****ty).

Same. Well, I just ended up uninstalling it but knowing Win 10, it's probably gonna reinstall itself at some point.

I'd assume that at this point there'd be some stores that just have copies of Win 7 lying around for cheap*. Or maybe they've been somehow forced off the market.

* = Except in Finland where after 8+ years, you can still get Win 7 Pro EN for 180bux lol

Isn't it standard for most operating systems to try & get you to use their associated cloud services at startup? I don't get hounded by OneDrive, but that's probably because I use it on purpose, so I'm logged in at boot. I recently switched from DropBox to OneDrive when I discovered, after accessing my account for the first time in months, that they were hiding (purposely making it as unintuitive as possible) access to my free storage by making it appear that I needed to sign up for one of their paid plans to access my data.

My most recent annoyance was with Amazon. My daughter's tablet somehow got signed up for one of their services & I recently discovered that I've been dropping +11€/month for something we didn't know we had & weren't using. I normally watch my finances more closely but have been especially busy as of late. Their Android app harasses us to sign up for Prime every time we open it. #MaybeJaronLanierIsRight

I usually really like amazon but their subscription services are crap. It's really hard to keep track of what I'm signed up for, what it's costing me, how I'm paying them, and how to cancel. The charges on my card(s) show up just like any other amazon charge and the charges for normal orders are split up by shipment as opposed to by order so it's virtually impossible to pick apart what charge belongs to what item or service. They refuse to send monthly invoices or receipts either, which should be criminal honestly. The only one I have been able to get an email reminder about is prime itself, but none of the associated monthly services -- hbo, their reading service, the music service, the cloud storage services, I can't even remember which ones I'm signed up for. (Well, I know hbo since I just signed up for it, but the rest, meh.)

Hulu, dropbox, linode, they don't mind sending me little monthly notices that they either are about to charge me or did charge me. Amazon offers no such courtesy.

Microsoft services are never getting my credit card information ever again. They screwed me over on an asheron's call subscription which I cancelled and they kept billing me for for months and months. The CSR was able to verify that I had not played since the date I cancelled but they just claimed I didn't cancel, which is bull****. I was only able to get some months back through my bank but I lost like 4 or 5 months of subscription money (~15/month I think, which nowadays isn't a lot money, but back then it was to me). Seems like they owe me a copy of Windows 7 for my dad, eh?

i've never received a notice from any subscription based service related to being charged...

netflix has never sent me an email (other than the "we're increasing our price" emails)
hulu has yet to send me one
amazon doesn't even give me warning that prime is about to hit my account for $99

I went into my email and checked; the emails I'm getting from hulu are actually coming from paypal since apparently I used paypal to sign up for hulu. So I was wrong to praise hulu for sending out those emails. On the other hand, if you do get a charge on your card for hulu, at least you know what it's for. Unlike amazon. As much as I hate paypal I may start using it for all of these (little) subscriptions so I get emails like this when they are charged. It's not tied to any bank account (just a credit card).

Amazon continues to drain funds from my account. They're claiming that my account isn't even linked to their service, yet I can see that it is, via my account settings. I'm waiting for another incompetent response from Tier 5 or 6 in the escalation process. I'm thinking that this will only end when I have my bank block them, cancel my account, & take a hammer to my daughter's tablet.

If you are being charged Prime, just call them up and cancel.

Can't you take your account off the tablet?

We aren't subscribed to Prime/Premium or any other service according to our accounts. This was confirmed by them. The amount isn't consistent either. It ranges from $6.45 to $16.48. I don't really want to do anything until they can identify the problem, because they're terrible at reading comprehension, & I'm afraid to further confuse them with changes.

That really sucks. I've had good luck calling their customer support line. I always end up with someone in India but they speak better english than I do. It's always about something easy though, like once I got a box of stuff I never ordered (they told me to keep it) and another time I returned something and UPS marked it delivered but amazon's web site said they were still waiting for it. The CSR just credited my account and it was over. Never anything like phantom charges

The thing with Microsoft was that I wasn't hesitant to issue chargebacks and try to get my money back any way possible. With amazon (or a place like Costco), I use them so much that I'd hate to be blacklisted or something so I understand Mentat's desire to work things out amicably instead of going full crazy. (Not that I didn't try with Microsoft first, but they weren't willing to work with me at all, and not only that, they were rude as hell.)

To be fair, this is Amazon.fr, as in France, where the customer is always wrong, so that may have something to do with it. I received an email, that I of course can't reply to, passing the buck to Amazon.com, despite the charges being from Amazon.fr. We called them again & now they claim to suddenly know what the problem is. Apparently my daughter's tablet got signed up for Amazon Premium, despite that not actually being true according to the account, & that's why we're receiving seemingly random charges sometimes twice a month. In other words, they still don't know what the problem is & are telling us lies to keep down that handle time. The latest guy said he'd issue us a refund, which I'm fairly certain is also a lie, but I'll wait & see. I can't wait to cancel my account (I'll be keeping my Amazon.com account though) & take a hammer to this tablet.

P.S. After he lied to us about the problem being an Amazon Premium account, he told us that it was actually for ebooks that we supposedly ordered. Unfortunately, I receive an email for anything that's downloaded on that device, & there's not a single ebook on that list (I double-checked my order history on the website to confirm), not to mention that I'm the only one with the password to approve downloads.

Ever heard of Free? It's the super cheap & awesome-when-working fiber optic internet service in France. When I moved to my previous address from the one before that, I confirmed over the phone that I could just take my "router" to the new place & that it would be ready to go. I move in to the new place & call them to have the service enabled, & then they tell me that there's no fiber in my building & that they'll have to send someone to install it. They sent me a ****ty old cable "modem" to use in the meantime (even though they continued to charge me for fiber). A month later, a guy shows up to do just that. After drilling holes through two of my walls & running a line through my apartment, he comes back after going into the basement, & tells me that he can't finish the installation that day & that I'd have to wait for the company that owns the line outside of the building to connect it to his line. After about a week of not hearing anything back, I called them up & for two months they claimed that I was lying about the installation not being complete, & instead of sending a technician back to confirm, send me a replacement router. Needless to say, it didn't work, & after they victim-blamed us, we decided enough was enough, so we cancelled the "service" & received a nice **** you in the form of a hefty disconnection charge.

Yeah, the French don't really do customer service.

Yeah that sucks.

Personally I've had disputes resolved with Amazon diligently in the US. One time my parents ordered the audio version of a book by mistake (came in a CD) and I called to return it. They refunded the money and told me to just keep the CD.

Are you sure your credit card or Amazon account aren't compromised, Mentat?

That's certainly a concern, but it's hard to say because Amazon.fr can't make up their mind about whether or not the charges are actually coming from them (sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, depending on who you speak with). Either way, I'm calling my bank today to block any further charges from Amazon.fr.

I have one credit card I like to use for purchases and such rather than have a few dozen transactions to track in my bank account. The bad thing about choosing to do this was not being diligent about verifying the charges on the card. Although I had been planning to come up with a system, being charged for an extra few months of HBO Now by Amazon made me do it. I cancelled our subscription after we caught up with the last season of Game of Thrones but didn't notice I kept getting charged. They refunded me some or one of the charges and I considered the others "Stupid Tax". Now I have a separate spreadsheet linked to my budget that I import the statement data into each month and categorize the transactions.

I had an issue with Microsoft (Xbox) recently. I have Gold and wanted to purchase some items that were on sale for Gold members for my son. When we tried clicking on the deal price it kept trying to get me to add Gold to my account. I'd had problems with this in this past. We then clicked on the normal price, hoping that it would adjust down to the sale price in the end. It didn't and we ended up spending about $30 more than intended. Online Chat resolved the problem by refunding the purchases which I thought was cool because I cancelled Gold a long time ago due to an issue they did not resolve to my satisfaction. Funny, there must have been some glitch in my account because after that, selecting the sale price worked properly and took me to the correct check out screen.

The varying amounts Mentat is being charged sounds like some sort of in-app purchases. Hope you get it sorted.

Rogue Reboot - A Windows-10-Claiming-To-Forcibly-Reboot-At-10:46-AM-But-Doing-It-Already-At-10:43-AM-Instead Story

Hmm, I did "discover" something the other day. I never knew that the way you must be supposed to get to the login screen from the Bing Picture of the Day sort of screen is to swipe up with your mouse. I just usually double clicked or any other number of bizarre spastic actions to try to get to the login prompt.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/new-processors-are-now-blocked-from-receiving-updates-on-old-windows/

I guess I can't be a Windows 7 hold-out for too long...

It's funny that M$ (that's still so funny, right?) never allowed the free upgrade for Vista users. The Windows 7 PC I upgraded on the last day of the free offer was originally an XP MCE PC that I purchased in '07 (it is a refurbished HP from TigerDirect). The only time I purchased Windows by itself was when I bought an OEM version of 7 to upgrade that PC. Their argument that Windows Vista PC were probably too old to upgrade is silly because the laptop I purchased that came with Vista was newer than that old desktop. I actually would have upgraded that laptop without thinking too hard about it. Now, it looks like that old desktop finally died and that old Vista laptop is hooked up to the monitor in it's place.

So over the past four years I've had some problems with the desktop. I'm not normally a power user or heavy gamer so I don't usually have a problem with old or low end PCs. First, when we moved here the computer seemingly didn't survive the move. Not willing to give up, I opened it up and poked around, removed some components and reinstalled them and then it worked. A couple years later it started acting up with a kernel error and blue screens. Seems to me I rolled it back and did some other memory or disk diagnostics and managed to get it stable again. Don't remember if that was 7 or 10. Now what it was doing is giving me a kernel error and rapidly shutting down and beeping at me. Didn't really feel like dealing with it so I swapped it with the old laptop but I would like to go back to it and see if I can fix it again. Anyone have any ideas what the likely causes of this issue could be? I'm also more likely to engage in risky behavior on that computer as I'll download and install various programs some of which might come from sites that have mal-intent. I usually scan everything before installation but I'm just throwing it out there in case somehow I corrupted my system which could lead to such issues. If I do get the old machine working again I might just restore it to original XP state.

And now it wants to install some Windows 10 Creators bull@@@@.

If it weren't for my UE4 failures, I'd actually almost feel like trying out some kinda Lunix thing at this stage.

Huh, now it ran that whatever update and now rearranging shortcuts on the desktop messes the other ones up in odd ways (icons moving to the very bottom, random rearrangements etc.). And, as usual, some file associations have been reseted.

gg m$

Sucks.

I think you can run UE4 in Linux. Probably not very stable but they're working on it pretty sure.

edit:it might only work in one distro but i bet its ubuntu and you could run it in ubuntu studio

Well, I guess you can do something with it on Linux. But alas, I'm done with UE4 for now.