Hi everybody, I'm new here and need your help if you have any to offer, I'm not a tech head, but I'm not an imbecile either, so here's the deal. In late August, Word disappeared from my system, not the icon, the entire program, and about six, eight weeks later, Excel followed. I never use PowerPoint and of course, THAT stayed. I cannot begin to tell you how much I have done by research and recommendation, and how many times I've been insulted by people who couldn't answer the question and had to make it something I did wrong to save face, I guess that's the way it works in their world, but not in mine, I can understand being stumped by something, even if you're well-versed in the subject.
Turns out that this has been happening more and more to people, not just home users like myself, but companies with hundreds of PCs. When people ask on the MS Forum, they get the same bit I did, but it doesn't have any application because they won't acknowledge that the program is missing, they keep thinking the icon is gone and people are going by that, and when you click on the version you have, in my case 2019, it just takes you to a site that tells you to go on the 365 subscription plan. You can imagine what I'm thinking. I went to another forum online for help, and they were like something out of an SNL skit, with one moderator telling me that Staples doesn't know how to install Windows, on a system that I've been using for five years at this point, and another moderator accusing me of using pirated software and being so far gone that I, buh duh, keep deleting programs from my system. I contacted MS support, was issued a ticket, and that was the end of that, I wrote back three times and not a reply. Bitdefender staff tried to help, but it came down to them wanting me to give them control of my system, and I might consider that if Christ came down from the cross and asked, but that's it, so i just said, no, thanks.
I've been using WordPad to get by because I'm completely overwhelmed, and then this week, I called up a very important file and it had been changed from RT to DOC. And big sections of it were corrupted; later in the document, pages repeated, but I could reconstruct it, but in the beginning, it's gone. I changed the font, I saved it as a PDF, I downloaded two file openers and they couldn't open it, I converted it to PD, nothing. When Excel went, I had a file that I desperately needed, and MS who has been shoving Adobe Acrobat at me and even downloaded a link I could purchase it from without my realizing in my travels, said it would open this file "in the cloud," which I don't do, but I wasn't loaded for choice, and I quickly printed it out so I would at least have a hard copy. If you're going to yell at me about back up, relax -- I just put a thumb drive in, and after the directory loaded, they titles all faded and it disappeared, so I called it back up and all of the RT files had turned into DOC with the same corruption. Oh, and I've tried to peel back the Windows Updates to August to see what happens, and it won't let me do a number of them. This seems like some sort of malware to me that is getting by Bitdefender, which, to my mind, means it must be very specific in purpose and from a source with a lot of,,,expertise. Anyone have any thoughts? Sorry, this is so long; I'd appreciate any help.
