A beautiful morning, I have just got up, and already I hate Microsoft.
That’s because part of my routine is to turn on my laptop and look at my email. This I did and … it wouldn’t let me in.
I don’t have a password on my laptop; it never leaves my house, and only I use it. But … yesterday I installed some software via the Windows Store – a first – and it made me login with my “Microsoft account”, and then reset the password, and a load of other nonsense. Then Apple made me do the same. I did my task and thought no more about it.
This morning I discover that Windows silently applied that “Microsoft Account”, not to the Windows Store as the display suggested, but to my entire computer. And that is why I was presented with a demand for a password. Of course I don’t know it – it’s a junk password. I don’t *want* to login to my PC using that account. So I requested shutdown, to see if I might get the option to “login as another user”.
Nope. What I got was “we are installing an upgrade”. Very very slowly.
They’re still doing it. Almost half an hour later, it’s “working on updates 15%”. I’d like my breakfast, please, but Microsoft have forced me this morning – twice – to fight with their software.
I’m typing this from a backup laptop. I’ve found easily some Google results that suggest I can get rid of the unwanted account from my PC. I imagine that an hour’s work will undo the havoc: an hour of my life gone, simply because of corporate arrogance.
Is it too much to ask, Microsoft, that you ask me before you screw up my morning?
UPDATE: An hour and a half after I first guilelessly wandered into my study, things seem to be back to normal. I’ve returned the PC to use a local account. In the process I found that Microsoft decided that I wanted to use tapping on my touchpad, so I had to work out where that was and disable it. Then, when I restarted, it didn’t go to the desktop, but sat, displaying some pretty landscape picture – yes, they’d decided, silently, to force display of a picture on the “lock screen”. I disabled that too.
Amusingly they also fiddled with my taskbar. I don’t use Edge – does anyone? – so I put Internet Explorer as the left-most icon. Microsoft primly moved Edge back to the prime position, and moved IE two along.
We need legislation. This is a lovely morning, and half of it is gone, and I have no redress, purely because of arrogance by someone whom I have never heard of.