Re-activation window causes disaster

The last I heard, she sent me an email yesterday stating "Would you believe when I turned it on this morning it was like nothing had ever happened!"

I assume that means that her computer has reverted back to Windows 10 and that the reactivation was sucessfull afterall. I've tried to contact her several times to confirm, but haven't got a response. My daughter, who lives by her, also said things seem to be back to normal.

I just wanted to report back since you were all so kind to try and help. If I hear anything different I will let you know.

Nikilet said:

... If I hear anything different I will let you know.

Thanks for the update. Please do let us know if you get to the bottom of this, you've got us intrigued :)

My bet is on an XP VM to support an obsolete HP printer...

She finally got back to me. I don't know if a real determination has been made on what caused all this, but the reactivation she went through apparently ended up working as she confirmed that when she turned her machine on yesterday everything was back in place. She has an external hard drive coming and is going to have that tech person access her computer remotely and take care of all that backup stuff for her. I'm so happy for her. This is just a family farm but they farm over 10,000 acres and have lots of leased lands and such and it would be a real nightmare for them if she lost her information so I'm really tickled she has ordered an external and is going to get that backup business taken care of.

Thanks for listening to me on this.

Bree said:

I'm with NavyLCDR on this. I suspect if you Google the phone number given you'll find it doesn't belong to Microsoft at all. More likely it's a malware scam. If you can get into Windows 10 again (safe mode?) try a Defender offline scan.

Windows Defender Offline Scan in Windows 10

Here in NZ we have had the scammers ringing around trying to get into our computers using the1850645951 number, a number that is Australian. On my phone you just add the 006 to get the country code

All the same calls I've received and some of my clients when I pinned them down have been from Windows Tech Support, Windows Support group or some such, never said Microsoft except one time one of them said he was a 'Microsoft Engineer". It's the thing about names, saying Windows automatically means Microsoft. In a similar vein, I've had 2 calls purporting to be the IRS saying they were filing a lawsuite against me.