'technical' support me ar*e

gline

dbnavan wrote:

I wasnt there to fix the problem, i wouldnt meddle with a machine under warrenty to a company especially when its possibly a dodgy cpu, if I lift it out and damage it, it becomes my fault!!

I was there to show him how to backup.

fair enough.. so the customer paid just to have his stuff backed up? :eek: im in the wrong job, LOL.
seems to me the customer lost out bigtime, paid money to have a backup and format and still same problem with the machine, which he would then have to go to manufacturer to get replaced or fixed which would no doubt take a good while.

Heinrich

gline wrote:

fair enough.. so the customer paid just to have his stuff backed up? :eek: im in the wrong job, LOL.
seems to me the customer lost out bigtime, paid money to have a backup and format and still same problem with the machine, which he would then have to go to manufacturer to get replaced or fixed which would no doubt take a good while.

Apparently the machine would not function so the OP opened it and used the fan to cool the innards thus allowing the machine to boot. Then the data was saved. I might venture that the data was probably more valuable than the sub standard computer so in that case the OP solved the major part of the problem.

The format and reinstall was recommended by the manufacturer's help desk. Then after this shoch treatment if the machine won't do what it was supposed to do it would be returned for the hardware phase...:rolleyes:

CiaranC

The OP seems incapable of grasping the fact that a €300 support contract doesnt provide for an onsite by an engineer to retrieve data, it provides for returning of hw and sw to a factory state in case of failure.

dbnavan

gline wrote:

fair enough.. so the customer paid just to have his stuff backed up? :eek: im in the wrong job, LOL.
seems to me the customer lost out bigtime, paid money to have a backup and format and still same problem with the machine, which he would then have to go to manufacturer to get replaced or fixed which would no doubt take a good while.

Didn't pay me all this was done for a friend now that I have proved my point attacks are coming at me? I never charged him, i didnt have equipment cause I wasnt in his house for that purpose. It just happened that he mentioned to me would i help him backup cause company X wanted to format his drive.

Heinrich

CiaranC wrote:

The OP seems incapable of grasping the fact that a €300 support contract doesnt provide for an onsite by an engineer to retrieve data, it provides for returning of hw and sw to a factory state in case of failure.

The methods used to restore the HW/SW to factory state usually result in data loss! I have an external HD full of stuff (from work) which if I hadn't backed up would have been lost!

I would never trust a *cough* factory restored computer. I have seen the splendid results of these efforts. Some of this stuff is so unreliable it defies logic.

dbnavan

CiaranC wrote:

The OP seems incapable of grasping the fact that a €300 support contract doesnt provide for an onsite by an engineer to retrieve data, it provides for returning of hw and sw to a factory state in case of failure.

Ciarian drop this 300€ euro sh**e the point is the problem was hardware as proved by fact machine crashing during reinstall. Your taking this agruement in a totally wrong direction. FACT microsoft blame hardware or drivers for tis problem, FACT computer crashed again during reinstall,

thus hardware is pinpointed as harddisk was blank when reinstall took place.

so for €300 they paid a guy an hours time on technical support, drove 40 miles to pick up and collect and return, all before they get to fix Actual problem then they return fixed problem to customer drive back to base.

Data lost, day burning cd's

All for a problem I pinpointed as hardware failure to start with

BigEejit

what are all the personal attacks on the OP about? ... to be honest I would have expected a bit more for €300 that some twat reading from a screen that the very first thing to do is blow away all your data ...

but I agree with several of the posters, Dell and the like offer support because they have to, people will pay a little more for that peace of mind that Dell with fix their machine.... unfortunately what they dont expect is that they may be asked to blow away all their personal data (in the case of home users) or business data (in the case of small business that cant afford to have an IT dept. set up daily backups etc) in their very first call to that support.

I can see the point of the Dell's and other companies, its a loss making part of the business so try to make sure that the least possible amount has to be done to get the customer back to a working computer again ....

Personally if I had to ring Dell or someone for what obviously was a hardware issue and they told me that i should format my machine, I wouldnt, I would just ring back in 30 minutes and say done that .... problem still there, now what?

Boggles

If your backing up after something happens you are doing it too late. The owner of the machine had data that was worth money and should have protected this data, he was lucky it wasn't a hard drive failure and he was lucky that he had a friend like the OP who could bail most of his data out.

Home users have no need for daily or even weekly backups, most valuable data they have is there photo's or home movies. Backing up e-mails is generally not needed as they mostly consist of monkey's peeing in there own mouths and such.

Tech Support and technicians have protocols to follow (very frustrating at times), and like any other profession you get people who are bad and good at their jobs. One thing I have learned from ringing tech support with a hardware problem is just lie and tell them the machine is dead, there checklist goes out the window and they send an engineer.

As for talking people through editing the reg, this is a definate no, no.

gline

Boggles wrote:

As for talking people through editing the reg, this is a definate no, no.

yeh in 99% of cases this is sooooo true, unless u get someone on the phone that REALLY knows what he is doing , then i never used to mind

dbnavan

If u use ur head and follow instructions properly editing registry isnt as complicated as it seems, mind u, u have to know what ur doing of course, but I personnally wouldnt think twice about editing it, but then I always was one to want to know how things work.

Boggles

dbnavan wrote:

If u use ur head and follow instructions properly editing registry isnt as complicated as it seems, mind u, u have to know what ur doing of course, but I personnally wouldnt think twice about editing it, but then I always was one to want to know how things work.

There is a huge difference between editing the reg yourself and talking a complete novice on the phone through it. Microsofts Technical docs are vast and do not always have the right fix for every problem.

The benefits of a fresh install are that the machine will perform much better as it will have most likely slowed down from use, plus you correct the current problem and any other problems that might have been lingering.

Much faster in most cases to shove in the image restore cd and get back to smooth running factory restore state.

StRiKeR

aidan_walsh wrote:

No, nope, wrong. Have you ever tried telling anyone that they will have to wait a couple of days for their computer to be repaired? Home users will hate this, because they want to write their emails and play their games now. Business users will most likely not be able to do their jobs without their computer, so they'll be even happier to hear it.

Also, like CiaranC said, you'll bring a busy department to a halt if you're spending hours trawling through the MS KB looking for a fix to an obscure problem. In house companies can afford to spend more time doing this, people dealing with home users over the phone can't.

I do tech support for end users
sometimes it is easier to reinstall, but I always ask rather if they have data they want to keep and if they would prefer to backup and reinstall or repair, I have to say everyone of those users took me over 2 hours to talk them through recovery console to sort out the registery, some of them gave up half way through before they got anywhere close to finish.

but tell them to back up and not giving them the options on what they would like to do isn't the best support. I hate to lose my data if you ask.

_Kaiser_

If you have the time and money yourself to sit and troubleshoot a software issue for a customer and/or hunt through the hard drive to backup their data, providing a tutorial in the process, then great and you deserve to be well compensated for this.

HOWEVER.. for the multinationals and most large IT departments, the first step will be to eliminate software as the cause of the problem, as quickly and efficently as possible. This means reloading/reimaging the PC in the majority of cases.

Under the warranties provided to home users (and even Corporate customers), you'll see that no responsibility/liability is accepted for user data. Neither are tutorials on how to use the software provided (this, perhaps suprisingly is also relevant in the Enterprise market). Furthermore, all troubleshooting is performed on a best-effort basis and may or may not solve the issue first time.
You would be amazed how many people never bother to read the terms and conditions of the warranty, but then scream when they don't get their own way.

Parts are generally only sent out only after all other troubleshooting has been performed, both to ensure the probabillity of a fix and to cut down on the repeat (service) calls.... someone suggested just saying the PC is dead. Not a good idea, as the tech will then make a "best guess" as to the problem, which will likely not fix the issue & thus result in even longer downtime whilst the true cause is discovered.

Boggles

Kaiser2000 wrote:

Parts are generally only sent out only after all other troubleshooting has been performed, both to ensure the probabillity of a fix and to cut down on the repeat (service) calls.... someone suggested just saying the PC is dead. Not a good idea, as the tech will then make a "best guess" as to the problem, which will likely not fix the issue & thus result in even longer downtime whilst the true cause is discovered.

Why would they send out a part without dignosing the problem, impossible to guess what's wrong (even best guess) if you say the machine is dead. Plus it's on site warranty, they would send an engineer out to diagnose the problem

StRiKeR

well I dont need to have time and money to sit down for hours to talk the customer through since I don't work for myself, I'm just a little Tech support guy working in a computer sales company. all I do is assist the customer the best I can to get the system up and running again without losing everything if thats what the customer prefer.

half the time they just go for the format and reinstall anyway since they couldn't be bother spending much time to fix the problem.

I dont think anyone ever read the terms and conditions at all. I haven't spoke to one who had.

Don't you just hate that when a customer turns around on the phone and say, my computer not working, it doesn't work, and you ask what's happening and all they tell you is "I DON'T KNOW", it really helps if they can discribe the problem with a bit more details.

gline

StRiKeR wrote:

Don't you just hate that when a customer turns around on the phone and say, my computer not working, it doesn't work, and you ask what's happening and all they tell you is "I DON'T KNOW", it really helps if they can discribe the problem with a bit more details.

oh man , how many times have i heard that *sigh*

StRiKeR

Boggles wrote:

Tech Support and technicians have protocols to follow (very frustrating at times), and like any other profession you get people who are bad and good at their jobs. One thing I have learned from ringing tech support with a hardware problem is just lie and tell them the machine is dead, there checklist goes out the window and they send an engineer.

As for talking people through editing the reg, this is a definate no, no.

thats very true, and big time frustrating, so many times I just wanted to quit the job and go do something else.

when you first started in a big company, you try to do your best, but after getting familiar with the company policy and how corrupt the management is, you just wouldn't bother as much and continuosly looking for another job till you find one.

Saruman

dbnavan wrote:

Last time I checked Blue Screens dont occur in command prompt bootup

Huh???? What is this the 90's????

Has not been a command prompt boot option since windows 98!!!

Win2k/XP have a windows command screen option which boots to a Dos type window but its STILL loading windows, it only loads the command window instead of the explorer shell.

In Gateway i worked in the corporate market for most of my time so i dealt with Servers and networks from our big business customers who had hundreds of machines from us.. Almost all of which had IT departments and we would usually deal with the IT people. We would still troubleshoot because at the end of the day they did not know as much about troubleshooting than we did. Rarely would it involve a format.

The home market is different though. You can not possibly offer that kind of support.

And you paid €300 for on site support for 3 years?? I mean think about it.. at an absolute minimum it costs €150 per hour from most companies.. i know it is for mine. Though mostly they pay a yearly premium of a grand or more for a small office, depends on how many computers etc. This is premium personalised support though... Id the likes of Dell etc offer on-site support they cant possibly send engineers around for every little thing that happens.

Oh and backups take minutes??? Thats a load of bull and you have to know it unless you are not actually in the business and do not actually do this for a living. At an absolute minimum you are talking about 30 mins to do a backup and thats before you even start fixsing the problem. Your average computer manufacturer cant do this...

You are also forgetting that when they send an engineer, its NOT one of them that gets off their arse and goes to fix it.. They have a contract with a support company such as ICL in the UK etc. This company will only do what the contract says... they are lego men... If the computer manufacturer tells them to replace a CPU, they go out there... replace the CPU and if it does not work, escalate back to have another call logged.. If the engineer is in a good mood and in some way intelligent they might investigate for a few mins but they cant stay there trying to fix problems.

You also have the problem of liability. NO computer company can be liable for personal data lost.. its up to the customer to back up and usually this is in their warranty agreement. IF engineers started backup up and restoring info thats taking responsibilty for data and when something goes wrong... the customer will be expecting it to be sorted and if a computer manufacturer is then liable for the lost info they can be sued for thousands!!!
Its just NOT possible

If you expect PREMIUM support then get it from a 3rd party support company like mine or any of the other people on this thread who are telling you the same thing. It will cost upward of a grand a year but will usually cover a small office for that price and if it cant be fixed over the phone easily enough or by remote access then you will have someone there that day or the next to sort it.

dbnavan

Saruman wrote:

Huh???? What is this the 90's????

Has not been a command prompt boot option since windows 98!!!

Really?????????

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/chsafe.htm

:rolleyes:

safe mode with command prompt loads nothing only command prompt, no drivers no dll files, good old command prompt!

Saruman

Whats wrong with you??? Seriously... feck sake if your going to post a link thinking to prove someone wrong then at least READ whats on the damn link.
[edit]
Wait are you confusing "Command prompt" with "Safe mode" by any chance? If so then it makes some sense.. though trust me.. you can and will get a blue screen in safe mode if windows is screwed up enough.. safe mode only does not load extra drivers etc like sound, video etc. It only rules out a rogue startup program or 3rd party non windows driver.

Boggles

dbnavan wrote:

Really?????????

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/chsafe.htm

:rolleyes:

safe mode with command prompt loads nothing only command prompt, no drivers no dll files, good old command prompt!

A machine can certainly blue screen in "Safe Mode with Command Prompt", if you start up an XP machine with this option you will see that it loads up several drivers. What it does is load a 'Command Prompt' instead of the desktop. To prove this type 'explorer' and hit enter and the Desktop will appear.

Where 95/98/ME sat on top of dos, 2000 & XP are NT based so they only provide an emulation of the old dos command prompt, a command shell.

What you could be thinking of is the 'Recovery Console', but that's a different kettle of fish.

gline

you can just make a dos floppy and boot up into that if you need dos. Though you will need to add ntfs drivers to access ntfs partitions afaik. Basically the dos prompt IN windows is not true dos as windows is still loaded in the background.

Saruman

Exactly... lets leave the tech talk to those of us who actually work in the business

Point of this thread was about procedures in Tech support and what "onsite Warranty" actually entails. Not how to or not to troubleshoot a PC.

Heinrich

Saruman wrote:

Exactly... lets leave the tech talk to those of us who actually work in the business

QUOTE]

Wear that one like a badge!!! There is a vast difference in talking and doing. Jargon might sound impressive to those who don't know but I prefer to see action. The fact that one rabbits on with tech talk is no guide to their competence.

Now I do not work in that business but I do have a very sound knowledge of computers, sound enough to be able to say that there is a lot of bull*hit talked.

The handy solution to most computer problems is format/reinstall. I have recently been confronted with a very full HDD which was posing bootup problems. Simply deleting excess stuff and a defrag and the machine was back in order.

Saruman

I agree there... there are a lot of bullshíters on tech support lines I do not actually like talking to people wo use Jargon.. i try not to when talking even to other engineers i come across.

StRiKeR

Jargon??

I had a guy on the phone last time asking me if our tech support speak perfect english before he purchase a system from us, because he is sick of talking to Indian from another hugh computer sales company, lol

[edit]maybe I shouldn't mention the name of that company

popey21

Saruman i worked with you for a few years and dont remember you takeing any Proper calls in gateway, i only remember you playing neverwinter nights and reading dragon lance books while haveing customers on hold, you geek:)


has anyone seen this . might give people an idea what it like to work in tech support

http://www.drunkencat.com/media/1133207934/Tech_support_in_India

Saruman

Daragonlance? Never read them.. nor did i play NWN as i did not have a machine that could play it PLenty of unreal tournament and delta force though. Methinks you are telling lies

As for doing feck all, thats true i was in the corporate server section so very few calls.. sometimes NONE so when i had one i had loads of time to give my full attention and get sorted.

StRiKeR

popey21 worked in Gateway?

Saruman Gateway still got call center here?

Saruman

Yes, Clientlogic in swords runs it. Lots of staff transferred there. Gateway have been trading in the UK again for a while. Different though.. not direct sales.. doing what HP etc do. sell to dixons and PC World etc.

Before i left in 2003 it was pretty much dead even on the home market. I believe things have picked up since there are new customers again. Their new PC's are pretty ncie too!!!
I spent the last year as Technical trainer so i trained in new people. Gave them a 2 week course on troubleshooting, computers in general and Gateway procedures and database systems they have to use.