Beware 0203 2907142 Microsoft Phone Scam

I had a phone call today from someone claiming to be from Microsoft, the phone display the number as 'unknown', which was a bit suspicious. The person did not speak very good english and said something about the phone call was about hackers of your Windows operating system. I explained that we did not use Windows, which he did not understand at first. I asked him for his telephone number and he said it was 0203 2907142.

I told him again that we did not use Windows, then he decided to hangup.

This was clearly some sort of scam to try to get me to go onto my Windows PC and then the caller would have most likely have gained access and then I would have been in real trouble.

Be careful, do not give any information to anyone claiming to be from a company that would like access to your PC.

Hopefully countries and governments will get together and seriously punish these criminals, not sure where the money goes to from these scumbag scammers, but it would not surprise me if it did not end up in serious criminals and terrorist bank accounts.

Is Windows 8 doomed to fail?

Recently I had a quick play with the new Microsoft Windows 8 operating system and was disappointed. The reasons why I felt disappointed are as follows:

• Without a touch screen to scroll to the left or right there is a naff scrollbar, it would have looked a lot better if they had to large buttons on each side like in Google Chrome.
• Some of the live tiles look annoying with constant movement.
• You cannot see more than 2 applications at the same time, this is clearly designed for tablets, but what about users with large monitors.
• The 2 application view does not allow a 50/50 split, there is always 1 application larger than the other.
• The old style Windows 7 option, seems to run a virtual machine, but is not as good as Windows 7 and the integration with the main operating system is clunky.  

Overall I got the impression this OS has been designed with the tablet in mind and I think if you are going to run it on a PC stick with Windows 7. The history of Microsoft OS seems to hint it is not going to be a good OS, see my list of OS and what I think of them below, hopefully Windows 9 will be the next good OS.

Windows history showing a trend.

• Windows 3.2 - Good OS
• Windows 95 - Not bad, but not great and seemed a bit buggy
• Windows 98 - Great OS and worked very well
• Windows ME - Rubbish
• Windows XP - Very Good OS
• Windows Vista - Dreadful, problems starting up and shutting down.
• Windows 7 - Good OS and runs really well 
• Windows 8 - So far, not good.