According to the bills that I pay, Sir Richard Branson appears to have a grip on my household. My telephone, cable TV package, computer broadband cable modem, WiFi Modem all now come under his banner. I signed up years ago with NTLworld which was devoured by Virgin Media some time in the past.
I noticed on the monthly invoice from Virgin Broadband that we are paying for their special support package, so when a bug hit my desktop, I gave them a call.
To shorten a long boring Saga, their support office in Glasgow linked up with my computer and remotely linked up with my computer and controlled it. It was rather eerie watching some remote hand moving my cursor and running checks and installing and uninstalling programmes – After at least four hours the Technician told me that it was my Firewall in the Anti-Virus Programme was causing the problems. – he had removed and replaced the offending programme with another and all was now well!
My desktop seemed faster and appeared to work well and I was pleased for two whole days. Then I tried to open iTunes, my iPod and my iPhone, they no longer worked.
The Virgin man had removed some vital part of the brain in his pursuit of excellence. Back on the phone to Glasgow, the next technician remotely controlled my computer for another 3 hours uninstalling and installing programmes before giving up. Meanwhile I had given up the will to live and possibly may have been rude to him.
I then contacted iTunes to relate the sad tale, they told me to perform all of the things that I and 2 technicians had already done.
The following day I was back calling Virgin Tech Support again. I was told that their system was down and there would be a long wait. Next day a third technician spent another three hours remotely controlling my computer, I watched as he attacked my registry, my computer then crashed and I was left with a blue screen and Windows 7 had disappeared, connection was lost and this angry man phoned back. I was told the experts were stumped. I should reinstall Windows which would normally mean losing my data, photos, etc. Would be lost.
Fortunately I have an external hard drive and my books, photos were all backed up.
The following day eating humble pie I accepted a deserved telling off from my grandson for not calling him first. He installed the latest Windows 10 and restored my backed up data. iTunes worked, my iPhone works and so did my iPod. My precious wife Pollyanna, the serene, beautiful one said, never mind it’s given you something to keep you busy!
The icing on the cake is that less than a month later, one of my closest friends told me that he had closed one of his companies and generously offered me a hardly used desktop computer with windows 10. It has a solid state hard drive with a 2 Terabyte hdd by Ivybridge plus an unmarked BenQ. 24” monitor. Talk about all singing and dancing 🕺💃and I won’t say much about Virgin (spit), all the gear and no idea! Meanwhile I donated my restored Dell computer to a local schoolgirl via Facebook so I am left with a warm feeling.
