Little Old Lady & Windows RT

[Witness]

My coworker being a little old lady had purchased a Surface 2 under my recommendation. She's enjoyed it, even though she needed a lot of assistance and taking advantage of free classes at the Microsoft Store.

When the Surface 3 came out, she wondered about it. I told her it was more powerful in that it runs like a regular computer. It was a nice upgrade, but I didn't actively encourage it. She really didn't need it. Fast forward to today, she said she got a phone call from Microsoft over the weekend reporting that she had over 2,000 errors on her computer. That immediately raised my scam alert. The guy on the phone claiming to be a MS tech had her go to a website and run a scan on her computer that detected the errors. All she had to do was punch in some codes and click this button to fix it - likely for installing their ransomware program. Well, after trying several times, the guy gave up and hung up on her. Only then was she suspicious.

Had this not been Windows RT, she would've been screwed. RT has its uses, such as this case with non-savvy computer users. The limited functionality is an additional safeguard for the novice users.

Anyways, story time is over.

 

[bdball]

Yup, too bad Microsoft killed it.

 

[920Walker]

She was able to spike him first, right?

"Better luck next time...slug heads!"

 

[_Emi_]

Yup, too bad Microsoft killed it.

you say they killed, I just say they, with windows 10, will bring new small tablets and phablets that will replace it, and while I am not the lover of intel, their processors have shown to be nice for tablets, they are making it happen. so I don't know why it's so bad, surface 3 runs great, not like pro, but it's nice. and I am sure SP4 will be nice too.
but maybe in future tablets and phablets will use the Windows Mobile 10 and we will have something like RT with ARM and all. but I don't see wrong with intel tablets either. anyway that's the point of Windows 10, to be one platform, and almost one OS running across devices.

anyway, it sucks there are these scammers around, it sucks this world is ran like that, you know, everything is money no matter what, if it costs people computers or cities, or people's lives.
It's good she had RT device yeah, but it doesn't remove maybe the next person the guy called fell on the scam. It would be nice if there was a way of Microsoft to stop it, but it's impossible... how can they stop people from calling you and pretend they are from MS tech and scam you?

 

[Witness]

you say they killed, I just say they, with windows 10, will bring new small tablets and phablets that will replace it, and while I am not the lover of intel, their processors have shown to be nice for tablets, they are making it happen. so I don't know why it's so bad, surface 3 runs great, not like pro, but it's nice. and I am sure SP4 will be nice too.
but maybe in future tablets and phablets will use the Windows Mobile 10 and we will have something like RT with ARM and all. but I don't see wrong with intel tablets either. anyway that's the point of Windows 10, to be one platform, and almost one OS running across devices.

anyway, it sucks there are these scammers around, it sucks this world is ran like that, you know, everything is money no matter what, if it costs people computers or cities, or people's lives.
It's good she had RT device yeah, but it doesn't remove maybe the next person the guy called fell on the scam. It would be nice if there was a way of Microsoft to stop it, but it's impossible... how can they stop people from calling you and pretend they are from MS tech and scam you?

All you can do is warn the uninformed. I spent another few minutes talking to her about other scam vectors such as spoofed emails. Sucks...

 

[grahamf]

Well if it does what she needs and it can't run viruses...