Saturday, August 09, 2014

Just Another Example of Microsoft's Outrageous DRM policies

My brother stopped in this week to see the family and go to a conference. He had a computer issue that just started. Whenever he tried to open any Office files from the past five years he would get this message:

"Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 cannot verify the license for this product."

He had a conference the next day which needed those documents. Since he had the original CD with its packaging and its printed license code, he re-entered the license code, but to no avail. We repaired, re-installed, rebooted, re-rebooted. Still the same problem. We tried solutions from searching Google. No joy.

Microsoft phone support said they could not help with the licensing issue, but for $150 dollars he could get Office 2013. Really Microsoft? You sell a product and won't help when it doesn't accept its original license code?

After spending 3 hours on this issue, we gave up and just downloaded OpenOffice - it had no trouble reading his old Word and Excel documents. I don't think Open Office will fail from license issues the day before his next presentation.

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