Surface_5
I’m going to take you back to the very end of September 2023. It didn’t take me long to realize that my Macbook Air was hacked. Despite this devastating information, I still tried to save it by going to BestBuy’s Geek Squad, which was a gamble, and then several trips to ABT. Enough about the Macbook Air, because this is about the Microsoft Surface laptop I purchased in an effort to replace my Macbook.
I bought a Microsoft Surface laptop from BestBuy, the same BestBuy I brought my Macbook to, and at the time I felt somewhat relieved. The original point of purchasing another laptop was so I could close all of my online accounts and start over. At the time I still wasn’t sure if my Macbook could even be saved. That dream quickly died when somehow the newly bought Surface laptop ended up being completely hacked, even more so than my Macbook. There was one time that I did insert a flash drive where I saved all of my photos and maybe something happened to that flashdrive? However, I brought the laptop back to ABT for a second time and they did a total reset of the device.
You may be wondering why I kept the laptop when I could’ve just used the Macbook. I kept it for evidence because this laptop was severely damaged, almost beyond repair. In the gallery you will find a picture of a hand written note on how to reset a Surface laptop. I really tried with this one. There were several apps on the laptop I couldn’t remove but used both the camera and microphone whenever the laptop was on. The laptop brightness would go up and down every few seconds. This was not a normal brightness feature that adjusted based on time, every few seconds it would go up and then down. It was a really weird way to scare me, I guess?
There was one point at the end of November that when I returned back to my former home from whatever I was doing, the password on the laptop had completely changed. Luckily, there is a feature where you can enter a custom pin that you created upon initially starting the laptop. I wrote the pin number down, so I was able to login but I would’ve been screwed if I didn’t. To this day I don’t understand how the laptop kept getting worse. It got to a point where I wasn’t even administrator of the stupid thing. It said I was but when I tried downloading something like DuckDuckGo, I would get an error message. Furthermore, half of the apps wouldn’t load and I would also receive an error message when trying to access them. The weirdest one was the “Snipping Tool” app.
As time went by I just stopped using it. That was until I met someone at work who offered to take a look at the laptop for me and try to reset it. He was successful in doing so but he told me there was an admin issue and the laptop looked like it was set up to watch everything I was doing. Before I moved back to the city I wanted to move to Texas. I applied to endless jobs in Texas and was always hit with rejection, which I didn’t second guess because the job market sucks. I even applied to work at McDonald’s and I never heard back. My friend who fixed my laptop told me there was a group of administrators that he was unable to properly view all the users because they blocked him from doing so but the group was named Texas. He had to reinstall Windows in order for it to work again. My friend said the laptop was creepy, so I have another eye witness to the violating hack.
I chose a Microsoft laptop because I was scared of Apple, but the whole experience made me question what the h*ll Microsoft was doing as a company. There are more accessible features on a Surface than there are on an Apple laptop. You’re able to go further, as one ABT employee explained it to me.
