AN: This article was originally written on the 7th February 2008, before the DocNetwork dedicated its broadcast time to the Victorian Bushfires
I have been out of the house all this week, helping house sit. While I have been here, I received an IM from a girl I used to go to school with, asking me to help her fix Word on her Vista machine. Normally I would have offered to go round their place and fix it there; however, when I remembered that this lass lived about an hour up the mountain, I figured that there were better alternatives. While I had thought that I could walk her through it, it was quickly discovered that tech support only works if the person being supported knows what you are talking about.
This was when I stumbled upon Remote Assistance, a service that was iffy in XP, and it seemed to work quite well on a Windows 7 to a Vista machine, which I suppose is quite appropriate, considering that he two OS’s are essentially the same; and both are infinitesimally superior operating systems to XP. While I worked on the issue, in the end recommending that she go and get Open Office, as the issue required a fresh install of the Software; I had to think, why exactly, after six years, where the only contact I would get from this girl, would be IM’s from her virus laden PC trying to invade my system, would she look at her MSN list and say, I’m going to go ask Doc to fix my computer.
Sure, I mean that if they were going to get their computer fixed, coming to me was a step in the right direction; granted I can fix just about anything, and I have filled the roll of the Tech Support for my various groups I have been attached to, and if given enough time, I can fix most of the issues the average person will encounter. But, that being said, there are people on MY MSN contacts list, that are to me, what I am to my other friends, and I know that worst case scenario, I can go to the TWiT Army and plead my case there, there are a number of excellent people there.
On the completely opposite hand, being able to fix computer issues is a double edged sword. While I on more often than not do succeed in fixing the issue that was presented; sometimes the issue is just beyond anyone’s help.
I refer to a case that I recently had to deal with, I was asked to look at one of the notebooks I’m not responsible for, despite the fact that it resides on my own network. The notebook encountered “The User Profile Service failed the logon” error, which pretty much means that its registry file was corrupted. Now I managed to fix this issue once before, but like most stopgap fixes, and that was all my first attempt was, to allow them to back up their data to allow a removal of the account, and to transmit it to a new account, which is the accepted procedure in this situation.
Now considering that any form of repairs to a system has inherent risks, and considering that this was the second time the system failed, so the chances of it working was already going to be an issue, and since they didn’t back up when they were presented with the opportunity, how exactly was I to know that the user account had corrupted in its entirety, and nothing I could have done could have done anything. However that also means that the client had no right to chew me out just because I tried to fix their computer when asked.
Sure I will catch some flak from this, but to be honest, it’s part of being Social Tech Support.
