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diglloydTools™
The Thieves at Microsoft — Again
I wasn’t kidding. I had to reboot off an external backup clone due to damage to my boot drive (the Mac OS X Finder somehow hung and destroyed the file system, it's wiped out beyond repair).
Look what these Microsoft scum do to a poor guy just trying to get working again.
The boot drive is a clone of my regular system on the same machine. Adobe doesn’t pull these stunts, even with their copy protection scheme. Microsoft does. I am making myself a new rule: never, ever buy anything from Microsoft. This bug has been known for 18 months, yet MS does absolutely nothing about it.
Meanwhile, I have too many Excel spreadsheets. Maybe Open Office will open them well enough to avoid mangling them. Or maybe I should consider other means. I just want what I paid for.
Demian R writes:
I've been experiencing the same activation issues as you... the last time this happened it took me 4 days and almost 8 hours to resolve the issue after dozens of phone calls and several abrupt disconnections.
I truly despise MS Office (especially PPT - we take all of that into Keynote and then re-design it), but most of my clients deliver business documents that require word, excel or PPT, so it's an unfortunately crucial part of my workflow... (though we are trying to change this by insisting clients send business documents in simple .xls, .doc, .rtf or - for slide shows - PDF formats.)
Anyhow, it happened again today when i cloned my boot drive into a new Mac Pro (with the Mercury Accelsior.... stunning)
I think MS has finally noticed this is a serious issue... because when i spoke to their activation department and explained that this happens every single time i plug in a new eSATA drive or move to a new machine (which happens a lot in a working design studio), they gave me 100 (!) new activations instances for my license.
This will work for me for at least 6 months.
It is not a permanent solution, but at least MS is painfully aware of it now.... I'd encourage your readers to insist on this when they run into the problem.
Some interesting notes of mention i learned from these calls to MS:
1) Because no Macs came (or come) with eSATA when MS Office for Mac 2011 was written, their activation agent sees eSATA changes like switching out an internal drive... which is apparently serious enough to trigger the deactivation.
2) They are working on a more permanent fix in a future update
DIGLLOYD: News to me about the activations... when I asked that very question (increasing the activation count), the MS representative adamantly refused, even said it was impossible to do (being lied to is even more infuriating). Apparently Demian actually got an MS representative who could do more than fog a mirror.
