Microsoft and Child accounts......again

-
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 live.com causes some internal error that results in the above.

I was about to give up and start afresh when I tried the original emailed accept family invitation link again. Weirdly this time it worked and I was able to create his account. My conclusion is that it takes a bit of time for the MS steam engine to get the right things in place behind the scenes. If this happens to you, be patient before trying the accept invitation link.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Python to Automate Visio

-
There are lots of examples of automating office apps out there but Visio examples seem thin on the ground. I guess this is partly due to its relatively recent inclusion into the Office fold. The example below shows Visio code to create a diagram with two rectangles joined by a connector. Its written in Python and makes use of the win32com package provided by pywin32 . This is installed by default with ActivePython . I had some difficulty getting the makepy tool to see the Microsoft Visio 11.0 Type Library that showed up fine as a registered object in Visual Studio and Excel/VBA. In the end I had to explicitly point makepy at the VISLIB.DLL. That said the code below will work fine without this step as I don't make use of any of the Visio Constants. import os import win32com.client # Two lines below generated from the command: # python makepy.py -i VISLIB.DLL from win32com.client import gencache gencache.EnsureModule( '{00021A98-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}' , 0,
Read more

Microsoft accounts for children - Verify that you're an adult error

-
I recently bought a Windows 8 laptop for my son for his school work. However, after logging in with his email address (also used on an Xbox) he was unable to use any online features which are pretty key to Windows 8 and Office 365. As it was a child account he got prompted that he "needed permission to use this service” and to have an adult sign in. However, when I signed in as an adult to authorise this I was redirected to the following broken page: https://account.live.com/ChildConsent/PaymentCollection Verify that you're an adult Error When you verify your age with a credit card, Microsoft charges the card a one-time fee of $0.50 (50 cents), and a portion of the fee is donated to charity. Our system is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. If the problem persists, please contact customer support. (40101-[2]-04c6207c-5883-4e91-b47d-2e6febec6efc) I contacted Microsoft support via email and got the following reply (24 hours later) Upon investigating both a
Read more

The computer says no

-
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
Read more