The Microsoft issue was I’d bought a laptop which came with an Office trial, but wanted to enable Office using a license I bought through work. It required uninstalling the trial version, running a power shell command line tool to clean it up, then install the required SKU of Office. The MS rep was also very knowledgeable, logged on remotely with my permission and I watched the whole process. It took a while, but the engineer knew exactly what to do and did a great job.
That was the first time I’d had phone support from Apple or Microsoft. I wasn’t too surprised at Apple, I’ve had great support from the stores before so that extending that to over the phone wasn’t too much of a stretch. I was pleasantly surprised at the speed and quality of the support from Microsoft though, I really couldn’t have asked for more. It’s just brain bindingly ridiculous that getting their software, that’s supposedly already on the blasted machine to actually work took such a torturous set of steps to perform.
I suppose that’s all incidental to the thread, but anyway. The things that annoy me about Linux are the lack of system upgrade options, you basically have to reinstall from scratch every time, and the awkwardness of system backups. I’m spoiled by a Time Machine I suppose, it’s the thing I miss the most on Windows as well.
[EDIT - Looks like I'm missing some options on keeping Linux up to date, thanks for the tips]
