My journey to receive a refund from Microsoft....

Let me tell ya'll a little story. One you will probably believe, but maybe not. It's all true, and I don't change names. There are no innocents here.

Before we get into anything else, let me tell you a little more about myself, so you'll know why this whole clusterf*&% pisses me off to no end.

Way back in '79 one of my high schools groups took a field trip to a local college, California State College, which the younger generations around me will know now as Cal U. It's in SW PA, don't get the wrong idea. This field trip was to the Colleges computer room. For me this was fascinating, and that day was what set me on my lifelong geek path. I've been working on and playing/tinkering with computers since I could get my grimy little hands on one, but that was a couple years later. I spent a year in real college studying engineering, but that wasn't for me, computers still had the draw, and I dropped out and went to a Pittsburgh area computer technical school, Computer Systems Institute. After graduation I ended up working in a Savings and Loans computer room as a mainframe computer operator. The job entails a lot - from running the jobs that need to be run to troubleshooting hardware failures. I've been doing this job for most of my adult life, in a few different companies and areas (of the industry), so I know just a little about the differences between hardware and software problems.

I got my very own computer in 1983, I believe, a Commodore 64. I moved up to a PC a couple years after they hit the market, and I could afford one. There was a lot more involved in the early home PC than there is today. Hardware was a lot more challenging to install and software was sometimes arcane in more ways than one. So like everyone else, I tinkered with just about every aspect of these, now primitive, 16-bit low-powered computers. You learn a lot by doing this, not that I know it all, by a long shot. I've kept up all through the continual hardware and software race to todays equipment and OS's. So after being in the industry, so to say, and being an avid hobbyist in the same vein, I feel pretty confident that I know just a little about 'computers'.

Now to the real meat of this little story.

My wife and I have a son going to college now, he is in addition to our daughter already in college. We had to buy him a computer, and the school recommended Windows XP Professional. Now I'm no stranger to Windows and its' various incarnations, but I don't like Microsoft and its' products in general. Since the school wanted it, and Zack will be there for a while, we wanted to make sure he had the most compatible software for the school as possible. The school, WVU, has on its Technical Dept (IT) site a link to a company called Journey Education, based in Dallas, that sells software at a discount to students. Great, a discount, we're always up for that, and the school recommendation, good too. My wife ordered the upgrade CD in plenty of time to make sure we had it before Zack had to be at school. Indeed, it did come in a timely manner. The trouble started when we tried to upgrade the operating system (OS).

We bought Zack a brand new computer and took it down to the school. I unpacked it and set it up, made sure it was all done with its initial Win XP Home setup and that everything looked good with it. Nothing was running on the system and it wasn't plugged into the school network. So basically a brand-new-out-of-the-box-computer, clean install of the OEM software and no changes made or done, no other software installed, no pre-existing software removed. Pretty easy to do an upgrade at this point, with this set-up, right? Wrong, pure dee wrong.

To Be Continued...