Tech Support is Neither and How to Cope [A gripe by Zube, Nov 21, 2000] I earn my bread and cheese playing system admin for two departments at Colorado State University. The hours are long but in many cases the work is very rewarding; helping people in an environment where technical support and skill is valued keeps me content most days. It's ironic, however, that most computer company's technical support is neither technical nor support. Here are two examples. Winbook disk drive develops typical hard drive failure "klunk." I work on it with various tools carefully noting each behavior for the better part of two weeks. I call [1] Winbook armed with a detailed description of all I've done. I am transferred several times, hung-up on once and have to explain my problem to five separate people. Finally, I get to someone ready to answer my problem and the conversation proceeds as follows: "Do you have a boot disk and a win95 cdrom?" "No, you see upon bootup the disk ... " If you don't have a boot disk and win95 cdrom, there is nothing I can do for you." "So you are telling me that if I simply call you and keep you on the phone for 3 hours going through your step-by-step instructions you'll fix the computer, but if I work several days on it and give you a detailed summary of what I did in 2 minutes, you'll ignore that information and not offer any support?" "That's right." Another time, a new Gateway laptop was beset with scramble-the-disk incidents and many random crashes. Finally, upon bootup himem.sys complained bitterly that it couldn't use much of the memory because it was bad. So I had two bits of evidence: crashes and errors from himem.sys. I downloaded an MS Knowledge Base article that confirmed a potential problem with the memory. I even went out and downloaded a memory checker [2] that boots directly into the program (it creates its own non-dos boot disk) so as to remove any potential problems with the installed OS. After confirming that memory checker ran fine on machines that had good memory, I tried it on the laptop. Boom! It showed that one of the memory chips was bad. So with these three pieces of damning evidence, I wrote Gateway technical support. They did not believe the results and would only swap out the memory if I followed their script, which entailed reformatting the hard drive, installing windows and performing several commands. I sighed deeply, did as they said, and low and behold I get the same himem.sys problem. Only then did they say they would replace the memory. Of course, I get not only the pleasure of doing their work for them, but I also get the fun of installing the new memory myself and restoring the OS, drivers and data. In addition, all that legwork I did for them (and for me) was completely wasted. Q: What's a tech person to do? A: several things: 1) Keep (very) regular backups, as tech support consists almost exclusively of reformatting and reinstalling windows, even if the symptom is that the machine is currently on fire. 2) If you must deal with tech support, lower your IQ and natural inquisitiveness by several notches. Pretend you are talking to a 4-year-old, which, in many cases, you might as well be. 3) Keep your sense of humor. I gained several gray hairs and probably lost six months of my life because of the above two incidents. It's just not worth it. People are depending on you and part of your responsibility is to take care of yourself. Getting that notebook drive fixed under warranty is nice, but if the end result is a nervous breakdown, the victory is pyrric. 4) Get someone else (perhaps a non-techie) do to the support calls. ----------- Footnotes: [1] Calling for tech support is usually more painful than emailing tech support, although the latter can stretch the pain out for days and weeks. [2] Memtest86 (http://www.teresaudio.com/memtest86/)