Gyroscopic Investing

WiseOne wrote:   My mother once got a phone call from a scammer claiming to be from Microsoft with news that her computer was infected by a virus.  The scammer then induces to victim to give the caller remote access to "fix" the problem. 

My dad was just telling me about a similar call he received two weeks ago!

"A man with an Indian accent claimed to be from Microsoft telling me my computer was besieged, and I said, 'I think you're a scam(mer).'After a little back and forth, he told me to go f__k myself. Not very nice."
lol

dualstow wrote:

WiseOne wrote:   My mother once got a phone call from a scammer claiming to be from Microsoft with news that her computer was infected by a virus.  The scammer then induces to victim to give the caller remote access to "fix" the problem. 

My dad was just telling me about a similar call he received two weeks ago!

"A man with an Indian accent claimed to be from Microsoft telling me my computer was besieged, and I said, 'I think you're a scam(mer).'After a little back and forth, he told me to go f__k myself. Not very nice."
lol

They actually operate out of Pakistan (whoops, guess I better add that to my blocklist too!).  Reub will love that one!  Here's a funny one where a prankster is the "victim":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UE_Q1pprEg

Microsoft is worried about its rep:

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/microsoft-c ... h-lawsuit/

MachineGhost wrote:
They actually operate out of Pakistan (whoops, guess I better add that to my blocklist too!).  Reub will love that one!  Here's a funny one where a prankster is the "victim":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UE_Q1pprEg

I thought it was going to be Crank Yankers.

Busy with family on Christmas Eve but I had to steal a moment to mention...

OMG my laptop has a new lease on life!!!!  Total cost $270 for the Crucial M500 480g SSD, the OWC data doubler, and 8 gb of RAM.  The work took about an hour, which included managing three little helpers (two nieces, one cat).

The computer automatically found the old hard drive in the optical drive bay and booted from that.  As Craig mentioned, the new drive was not recognized on boot and I had to format it using diskutility.  Then I simply launched the Yosemite installer from the file on the old hard drive, and told it to install on the new SSD.  Migration Assistant was invoked during the install, just told it to migrate everything from the old drive, and a couple of hours later, presto.  I didn't even have to tell it to boot from the SSD.  Easy peasy and you all should do this if you haven't already!

Thanks all for the great advice, and have a merry Christmas!!!

Glad to help. Sounds like you did a great job and have wound up with a wonderful computer. Merry Christmas!

WiseOne wrote:
Of course, Windows is the queen of cruft...it amazes me that Microsoft has never thought to fix DOS, or replace it with something more sensible.  Apple did the right thing by selling quality products, and I hope they stick with that plan.  Of course, for most people it's simply a high priced status symbol.  I know many people who are struggling with old Macbooks and never thought to upgrade - even a PhD biomedical engineer!  (he was going to buy a new laptop over Christmas even though his is newer than mine.  I told him what to do instead.)

You are a little out of date: Windows hasn't been based on DOS since XP. It's a real operating system now, pretty much on a par with Mac OS (a version of Unix) for the most part.

However, I agree there is more cruft in Windows than in Mac OS. The reason, though, is not laziness on the part of MS, but is the same reason that Apple's enterprise market share rounds to 0%. Big companies don't ever want to get rid of anything that was working, which makes it VERY hard for MS ever to get rid of any features, no matter how much maintenance problems they cause.