Month: April 2014

I was helping a friend today set up his Windows 8 laptop.  He is an inexperienced computer user.  He had somebody else start the set up for him a few months prior.  Now, when I start up his laptop it asks me for a password.  Of course, my friend doesn’t remember the password that the other person set up.  I contacted the other person and they didn’t remember the password used either.

So, it did show the correct email address for my friend on the log in screen which implied that a password was set up.  Being fairly new to Windows 8, I didn’t see any option to reset the password so I thought I might be hooped and have to re-install the whole operating system. This would have been a problem because the operating system came pre-installed on the laptop and I had no compact discs and no software keys.

So, I began trying a bunch of possible passwords that my friend may have used.  None of them worked!  Then, out of the blue, a message appeared that said the password could be reset at: account.live.com/password/reset .  So, I went to this page and selected ‘I forgot my password’, then clicked Next.  Then I had to enter some characters to prove that I was a human.  Then, it asked me to confirm my friend’s email address.  It sent an email to my friend’s email account.  He told me the CODE to enter onto the screen.  I entered the code and it let me create a new password.

Then, I proceeded to log in to the laptop using the new password and it worked!  I was at the main Windows 8 screen!

I am just documenting this so if others have problems logging onto Windows 8 this might help them out.

 

 

I was changing my Virgin Mobile voice mail greeting and pressed the key(2) to record an extended absence greeting.  After pressing the key, it would not let me cancel out so I proceeded to record the greeting.  After recording the greeting, I tried every option, including recording a new regular greeting, but was unable to delete the extended greeting.

I went online and could not find the answer to this question.  I am writing this blog post so that it is available online if somebody else has this same problem.  I even called the Virgin Help Desk and they just told me to re-record the greeting.  I knew that this didn’t work.  So, how did I fix it…I exited my voice mail, then got back in.  Immediately, it told me that I had the extended greeting on and asked me if I wanted to keep it or delete it.  I proceeded to delete it which got rid of the extended absence greeting.

The extended absence greeting was interesting because when you called my number, it gave a greeting and did NOT allow anybody to leave a message.  I could see a use for this to prevent frivolous messages being left on my phone, such as ‘I called you’..obviously I know that you called because I see you as a missed call!!!

To actually get rid of voice mail completely you would have to remove the feature from your calling plan.