Do it Yourself Technical Support

Technical support calls are, by no means, the highlight of anyone's day. You are put on hold endlessly and when you finally get to speak to a human they immediately transfer you to 'the relevant department'. Personnel at 'the relevant department' will not understand a word you are saying (and you probably will not understand a word they say) and after countless harrowing minutes of heated discussion, you will probably get transferred again! One cannot blame technical support staff for the poor service that they are known for. Technical queries are hard to diagnose (and harder to fix) over a phone. The sad truth is that software and IT companies spend very little on maintaining a proper support system. Once they have made a sale, a support system is an unnecessary expense. Sometimes, at the end of a particularly harrowing call, you might wish you could solve the problem yourself. What if you could? By following these two guidelines you can improve your chances of getting a positive result from a technical support call and, in some cases, could resolve the problem yourself.

1. Google it! Google is your one-stop destination for everything. From finding a cheap flight to figuring out a guitar chord to buying your wife something, Google is your portal to the online world. Somehow, we tend to think that when it comes to technical queries, Google is no good and for the most part that is true. Google does not speak English the way we speak English so asking it a vague support question will probably result in little or no useful results. However, if you enter in, say, an error number that was displayed on the error box you saw, there is a good chance that Google will find websites that have information regarding your problem. Most of these websites will be forums; places on the web were people, just like you, come together and solve their problems. In all likelihood, your problem has already been solved and is waiting on a website for you to find it!

2. Go Back. Don't you wish sometimes that your life had a rewind button? Time travel has consumed the minds of people throughout history but we are no closer to achieving it today then we were thousands of years ago. In the digital world of software though, time travel does exist. On the Windows platform it exists in the form a quaint little system program called System Restore. Mac users have the aptly named Time Machine that serves the same function. As you use the computer, both these programs periodically store 'snapshots' of your system. In the event that you install malicious programs or accidentally delete important system files, you can use these programs to take you back to the last stable 'snapshot' that was taken, effectively helping you travel back in time. Mac users, in particular, are treated to an incredibly beautiful user interface that makes you feel like you are actually going back in time!

When you hit a dead-end with your software or hardware, before you pick up the phone and make an hour long phone call, try solving the problem yourself. You would be surprised at how much you are capable of achieving.

Source: http://goo.gl/q8xCk