Techno Frustration

Are Microsoft trying to kill Visio? It looks like it's impossible to buy Visio by adding it to your Office 365 Home subscription. The only solution appears to be to create a separate (dummy) business account and add Visio to that subsciption -  https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_365hp-visio/where-is-visio-for-office-365-home-premium . I won't be doing that, time to look for an alternative!

I thought I’d finally bite the bullet and try to upgrade my parents broadband to a new provider. They have been on Demon forever, but the service has atrophied as they were first bought by Thus and then Vodafone. I visited the PlusNet and BT websites to find out what packages they could switch to only to end up with some rather strange errors: You don't have a compatible phone line. To provide you with a new service we will need to give you a new phone number The phone number and postcode supplied do not match; please try again. An online chat with PlusNet resulted in an impasse. Despite my parents having the number for 30 years apparently it wasn't valid and a new number was required - the computer says no! A bit of googling took me to the excellent BT community forums which showed this is a problem that other people have had. All the providers reference an Openreach database which contains phone numbers and addresses. It's entirely possible for this database to co

So Microsoft still make this child account thing more difficult than it should be. Today I decided to try and set up child number three with his own MS account. I added him to family and this sent him an email with the contents: a@b.c would like you to join their family as a child.....Accept Invitation Clicking on the link resulted in a link to login to MS or create a new account. Clicking create new account resulted in a URL not found error. I then decided to just try and create his account via the normal MS create new account process (login.live.com). However I could get as far as creating his account and verifying his email address but this was invariably followed by: There's a temporary problem with the service.  Googling showed that I'm not the first person to see this so it obviously isn't temporary -  cannot-verify-microsoft-account-theres-a-temporary  from 2017. My guess is that once you've invited a child via a link then trying to create the accout via