Technical Support Do Not know Answers

[roker]

When there’s a fault on a computer or periphery ,It would seem that most of the time no one knows a definite answer and they will say try this or that.

I am sick of technical support people doing this, they suppose to have the answers but I think they have a sheet of common faults to look up. Have they no practical experience of what they are setting up? I have spent hours setting up my Netgear wireles router to communicate with my laptop and printer, The Netgear support even had their remote assistant running on my computer, it works to a point, but now I have a problem with the pppoe/pppoA settings, their response is to press the N button and go to factory default, which means I am back to square one. They do not know the answer. A common one on Forums is (Have you updated the drivers?)
The same with my HP printer, it is set up to both the WSD port which is new to VISTA and Windows 7 and to the TCP/IP port. HP support could not tell me the correct configuration only to try things that I was not happy about. Eventually I got it working by doing a Restore.

Is I.T. not an exact science? Or is it, there is not enough people around that knows what they are doing? Magazines seem to have a definite answer in their Question section; If others cannot give definite answers, how can the likes of me learn?

 

[StrangleHold]

Just now figured that out. lol. Most tech support, might as well shoot yourself in the head with a nail gun.

 

[Aastii]

Most people that work for these big companies, like HP and Netgear that you mentioned, have, as you said, a sheet of questions and potential answers, if you ask them something not on the sheet that someone with even a small amount of computer knowledge would know, they will get severely confused, 99% of the time, they haven't a clue.

Even if you do know what you are doing, there are several possibilities for each problem. For instance, say you are having computer shutdowns/restarts, it could be a temperature issue, software issue, power supply fault, or a hardware fault with 1 or more of several of the components. Only by doing certain checks/tests can you single out, or at least give only a couple of possible causes to the problem

 

[StrangleHold]

But yeah, like said. Most have a cheat sheet that have a check list of things that could possibly be causing the problem. If none of it works, you might as well be talking to Homer Simpson.

 

[Nanobyte]

The upside of getting advice from someone reading off a sheet, often from the emerging countries, is that the advice is usually free and may do the job for the uninitiated.

If you talked to an expert earning a North American salary, it would only be free in industries that make exorbitant profits. Many companies offer a pay technical service; the sort of thing that also raises complaints in public forums.

 

[ThatITGuy]

When there’s a fault on a computer or periphery ,It would seem that most of the time no one knows a definite answer and they will say try this or that.

I am sick of technical support people doing this, they suppose to have the answers?

And I suppose you are talking about paid technical support?

No of course your not.

Most support on forums is free.

Most support from companies only relates to THEIR product.

eg: In the case of the Netgear modem - sure their support should be able to help you determine if THEIR product (the modem itself) is working.

But for free you should hardly expect them to help with ISP settings or line problems.

A bit of realism goes a long way

 

[ROFLcopter]

Depends what technical support you are talking about. If you are referrig to company techsupport that only deal with their product then yeah you won't get much help. You would probably get a lot better support from in-house I.T compared to general I.T.

 

[speedyink]

Only thing tech support is good for is getting free replacements (only certain companies). Otherwise, you may as well throw your phone into the toilet and get the answers from the bubbles that arise.

 

[Quiltface]

IT is not a "science" it changes way too much and it is soo broad. I agree it would be nice for the person on the end of the wire on netgears techsupport line to know every in and out of the device but that just isn't going to happen. If the thing is broken it is broken.. all they are going to do is run you through the steps to take to confirm it is broken and send you out a new unit.

So how do you learn you ask... you learn by doing. Say for instance Windows you could buy a microsoft press book on Windows 7 and know every little feature of the os but what it will never cover is error messages. I mean if they made a chapter on the BSOD that wouldn't look right would it. You just have to experience things and research answers really. You can't possibly know everything there is to know... noone does and anyone that thinks they do probably knows the least. Life is an open book test. Educate yourself enough to be able to know what your looking at and then finding the answers is easy.

 

[roker]

Thanks all. I suppose the price of technical support is in the price when you buy an item.
In Netgears case they are charging under warranty by using a premier phone line, the longer they keep you the more they receive, my first call took 3/4 hour
At this stage I would love to mess around with settings, but it took so long to get were I am, I do not want to go back where it will not work at all. The biggest problem was getting my wireless printer to work.

 

[Nanobyte]

I had a chat with my IP's technical support this week. My email client was having trouble connecting to the SMTP server. I was sure it was a server issue. I told the guy I was using Eudora. "Oh, we don't support Eudora, can you try webmail". So I run Firefox and send a test email which hangs up. "Oh, we're having problems with Firefox at the moment, do you have anything else?" After brief effing I started up IE and sent a test email with the same result. "Are you running the latest version of IE?" At which point I asked if their server worked with any software and I that would phone Help locally.

 

[Quiltface]

I hate cop outs... i hate it when i call ISP support when the internet is down, and as soon as they find out you have a firewall they tell you that is the problem... when it isn't. I worked somewhere and the owners used AOL... why i don't know... but they got a new computer and their email wasn't coming over to the new one. I called... they asked me if i had a firewall.. and i said yes.. (knowing this wasn't going to go anywhere) she said oh you need to turn it off... i said i cant if i do we wont have the internet anymore. she said well what kind of firewall is it, i said a checkpoint... she paused probably because she doesn't know what the hell that is and i probably could of said a banana and it would of made more sense. So we argued back and forth about that and i asked her to give me the ports if i need to open ports but i cant turn off the firewall. she didn't know what i was talking about, and then she wanted me to ping something like aol.com i said it wont work because we blocked ICMP out... i humored her and did it anyway and it doesn't work and she was like yeah you need to turn the firewall off... ahhh long story short i don't remember what fixed it.. but it wasn't the firewall, had something to do with their software. i hate AOL, always did. That was first and only time i yelled at someone on tech support.


btw AOL wasn't the ISP... but ATT does that to me too. (about the firewall)

 

[MyDixieWrecked]

My problem stems from users. A little bit of googling goes a long way, but most are just too lazy to try it. Heaven forbid you actually learn about the device you just spend hundreds of dollars on, let alone learn anything beyond that. Like in the case of your wireless printer. You had to do a system restore to fix the issue, but that's not Netgear's responsibility. Sounds to me like they went above and beyond their scope of support just to make you happy. If I sell a router, but your computer doesn't have a NIC (wireless or otherwise) you really shouldn't call complaining that you can't get online, but you will. You'll be all "Hey, man! I can't get on the interwebs! I have to have this for work! Hurry up and fix my shite!!!" The problem isn't tech support having to ask a million stupid questions (that's called troubleshooting, dick), the problem is people buy shit they have no idea how to use. Take your issue, for example. A wireless printer setup? That's like 2 seconds worth of work, but you didn't know your PC was screwed, so you blamed the people who were actually trying to help you. Learn more about your computer before buying something you clearly cannot setup by yourself or stop creating threads bitching about your own ignorance. Either way, you won't do it. You'll keep crying until mommy fixes it for you. Techs are the chosen people. Without them, you'd still be sitting there in front of your brand new printer wondering what it will look like when it's working. Now **** the **** off and stop shitting up my interwebs!

 

[Quiltface]

My problem stems from users. A little bit of googling goes a long way, but most are just too lazy to try it. Heaven forbid you actually learn about the device you just spend hundreds of dollars on, let alone learn anything beyond that. Like in the case of your wireless printer. You had to do a system restore to fix the issue, but that's not Netgear's responsibility. Sounds to me like they went above and beyond their scope of support just to make you happy. If I sell a router, but your computer doesn't have a NIC (wireless or otherwise) you really shouldn't call complaining that you can't get online, but you will. You'll be all "Hey, man! I can't get on the interwebs! I have to have this for work! Hurry up and fix my shite!!!" The problem isn't tech support having to ask a million stupid questions (that's called troubleshooting, dick), the problem is people buy shit they have no idea how to use. Take your issue, for example. A wireless printer setup? That's like 2 seconds worth of work, but you didn't know your PC was screwed, so you blamed the people who were actually trying to help you. Learn more about your computer before buying something you clearly cannot setup by yourself or stop creating threads bitching about your own ignorance. Either way, you won't do it. You'll keep crying until mommy fixes it for you. Techs are the chosen people. Without them, you'd still be sitting there in front of your brand new printer wondering what it will look like when it's working. Now **** the **** off and stop shitting up my interwebs!

damn

 

[roker]

Mr Dixie. Please get your facts right. I do not blame Netgear for my printer problem, I blame them because they cannot tell me why it works on pppoA instead of pppoe which it is supposed to, and then tell me to set it to factory default (N button) after they previously set it remotely.
I do blame HP though for the printer problems, and told them it was not acceptable that the HP printer CD would not install on a HP laptop, and took many hours to get working
My (PC) Laptop is not screwed, it is brand new, it would take 2 seconds if the CD would have installed!!

By the way, what is NIC wireless? I am still learning, I have bought books on the subject

 

[roker]

Only joking, NIC = Network Interface Card or Not In Computer

 

[MyDixieWrecked]

Mr Dixie. Please get your facts right. I do not blame Netgear for my printer problem, I blame them because they cannot tell me why it works on pppoA instead of pppoe which it is supposed to, and then tell me to set it to factory default (N button) after they previously set it remotely.
I do blame HP though for the printer problems, and told them it was not acceptable that the HP printer CD would not install on a HP laptop, and took many hours to get working
My (PC) Laptop is not screwed, it is brand new, it would take 2 seconds if the CD would have installed!!

By the way, what is NIC wireless? I am still learning, I have bought books on the subject

Mr. Roker,

My facts come from years and years of dealing with idiots such as yourself. You're not only ignorant of Google, you're rude to boot. You don't need a CD to setup a wireless printer, but you wouldn't know that, as you failed to research the process. There are less than five steps (if you don't count buying a computer with a wireless NIC) to accomplish this lofty goal and all of them were found on the first three or four thousand links Google provided.

You blame them for not knowing why your authentication works with PPPoA and not PPPoE? You wouldn't be able to comprehend the difference anyways, judging by your inherent lack of networking knowledge. I worked for Earthlink for a number of years and attempted several times to explain the difference, sadly to no avail. In those cases, they didn't really care about the real answer anyways (or they would've researched each process); they only cared that their internet worked. You also don't seem to realize that Netgear isn't an ISP, which is where authentication comes into play. They aren't supposed to know why it works one way or the other because they don't provide you access to the internet, which is what Point-to-Point over Ethernet entails. You see, when you get DSL service, you can set it up in many ways. Usually, the DSL Modem authenticates the user and assigns a WAN IP to whatever device is connected to the WAN port, but if you want your router to authenticate with MIDAS (or whatever they use), you can punch in your UN/PW in that firmware and have it establish the handshake. Again, you don't really care about this - you're just being a dick.

That being said, I can also say that not every tech is up on the latest and greatest. Many have trouble just answering the phone, which is sad as the system does it for them. However, it usually takes about thirteen seconds to realize someone doesn't know what they're doing and YOU spent hours with them. That tells me that you know less than the idiots trying to help you. Cheers.


PS - I've been on vacation. Please excuse the lateness of my reply.

Edit: I just noticed you posted your response on Christmas day. Christ that's sad. You know what, I feel so bad for you now that any response will go unanswered, as there's no point in kicking a man when he's already down. You win, buddy.

 

[roker]

Thanks for your help. Nice CV. Don't lose your sense of humour

 

[StrangleHold]

Nice CV. Don't loose your sense of humour

Dont feed it.