Windows support on my Mac
I just had the most surreal support experience I have ever had. I am running Windows XP Pro on my Mac using Parallels. I was trying to upgrade to XP Service Pack 2 and was having a few issues so I figured I would called Microsoft support and see if they could help. I figured I would get nowhere once they found out I was on a Mac.
After navigating their phone system I got a live person, actually persons, who were super helpful in getting me a new software key and straightening out some other issues in order to allow me to run the upgrade. I ran into a few more issues and the technical support rep, Siddharth, asked if I wanted him to jump onto my machine to help trouble shoot while I watched. I explained that I was running XP on a Mac and after a brief pause he said MS's official policy was to not support Windows software on Mac's, however he felt that since it was his company's software they did have some responsibility so he offered to help anyway. He jumped in, we had a nice chat for 30 minutes while he worked away and service pack 2 final got installed, thanks to Siddharth (you are the man).
I've got to say, this was probably one of the best customer service experiences I have ever had. This guy went way beyond what I had expected and everything worked out perfectly. If someone told me I would get outstanding customer support from Microsoft, especially while running a Mac I would have told them they're nuts, apparently I would have been wrong. It almost makes me want to switch back to PC ....... on second thought no, I'll just run their software on my Mac.
Search
About
Archives
Recent Posts
Links
Feeds
Mar 30, 2008 at 5:51 PM
Unbelievably a similar thing happened to me back in the early SP2 days. Using a - most likely - older Mac than you'll be using, no matter what I did, as soon as I actually managed to install SP2, Windows kept asking to be registered - so I would register it with my new license key - at next reboot, exact same issue, still said I wasn't activated and needed to activate Windows at that very moment otherwise I couldn't do anything. After getting pretty irate at this, I phoned Microsoft, got through to the tech support lines, and got a woman on the phone. I told her straight out what I was doing and she, as expected, declined to help. But I managed to talk her round, somehow, and she took a further look into it, then took my contact details to 'get back to me'. I was expecting that to be the last time Microsoft would ever talk to me. But no, a MS supervisor phoned me, rather intrigued, and gave the go ahead for my system to be fixed up. Which was great - I was using Windows on Mac! Unfortunately a month later the Mac motherboard decided to take a permanent vacation to the land of sleep and I've never gotten it working again to this day.
Still, great to hear I'm not the only one that's ever done this! Good luck with your Mac, hopefully it won't sink like a brick like mines did.
Thanks,
Grant