I have a tale of woe to tell which is all the worse because of Microsoft's abject failure to put things right.
On the first day it became available (26th Oct), I started the Windows 8 Pro download upgrade process. It's only £24.99 from here in the UK. On my first attempt, when prompted to enter payment details, I used my debit card. The response was an error message saying that the payment could not be processed and the software wouldn't go any further. So I then resorted to using my Paypal account to acquire two keys and a backup DVD. That worked fine.
On 29th Oct there appeared a debit card payment for £24.99 to "WINDOWS8 ESD BY AR CD 9987" on my bank statement. The following day I spent ages telling 3 different MS reps what had happened. I had to keep repeating myself because they find it nearly impossible to imagine that meaningful information could exist outside their omniscient computer systems. There was a glimmer of hope when the session ended with me being told I would be sent an email to which I needed to reply with a copy of my bank statement for verification. The email came and I duly replied with said copy of my bank statement. I have not received a single email from them since even though more than four days have passed (it is now Saturday, 3 Nov). I have rung twice since and despite spending ages on the phone each time have got absolutely nowhere. The last piece of "advice" I got was to get the bank to cancel the charge because a refund was not possible as there was no record of the event on "the system". I omitted to mention that the original event also failed to trigger a single email to me.
My bank tells me that I have to wait 17 days before I can raise a dispute of the charge with the bank.
The upshot is that, at least in my case, the download upgrade software, or backend systems, manifested a very serious bug. I expect many others may have experienced this. Please say if it has happened to you. Given the seriousness of this bug I would have expected MS to pull out all the stops to investigate and fix it. Instead they just seem to be ignoring it and don't seem at all bothered that they have robbed one of their customers.
If anyone has any ideas as to how I can get my £24.99 I would be extremely grateful. It is an utterly insignificant part of Microsoft's many billions but about a quarter of what I have in the bank right now!
