Yesterday, I was unable to get to figuring out a workaround from my Outlook error because I couldn’t get the computer back to its original “My Documents” configuration. In spite of my original decision not to try Microsoft support, I decided to contact them.
I logged into Technet and found the support screen. I couldn’t find Office 365, so I clicked on Office 2013 Professional and said I wanted one-on-one support. Back in the days when Microsoft support was mainly over the phone, getting to a tech was a two-part operation: first get a incident number assigned — usually after forking over your credit card number — and next being connected to a tech. In the Internet era, the steps are analogous. When I asked for support, I was shown a screen that told me to enter an incident number, and instructions to click on a link to get one. I clicked, and got a chat window. After more than ten minutes, I had my incident number. I’m not sure why this process has to take so long. There was a three or four minute delay after I gave the person my Technet number, and another five or so minutes while she got an incident number. It seems like this should be automatic; there is no judgment involved in the process, and no credit information needs to be collected if you’re already a Technet subscriber.
Once I entered the incident number and my Technet number, I got a comprehensive form to fill out, with places to enter not only symptoms and configuration information, but also already-performed troubleshooting, and links to similar problems on the web. I also linked to the two previous posts on this blog.
After a few minutes, I got a link to download a tool to examine my machine configuration and report the results to Microsoft. I installed it:
And ran it:
It gave me a couple of weird suggestions:
Note the reference to a version of Outlook that’s not installed on this computer and the reference to a non-existent Knowledge Base article.
I also got this:
When I tried to comply with the latter one, I got this:
I let that pass. After a while, it sent the data to Microsoft:
The Fix-it put a link on my desktop to the results. There were several problems identified as critical:
I’m not sure what any of that means, but I’m hoping the tech will tell me.
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