Tag: TECHSUPPORT

When electronics quit working, getting good tech help is never easy. You've got the Geek(y) -- but also shady -- Squad, helplines based on other continents and your go-to friend whose best suggestion is always, "Have you turned it on and off yet?" At the end of the day, most issues could be resolved if communication were better between tech support and customers. LG seems to understand and ...

Dell is apparently eager to compete with Best Buy and Walmart for the title of most despised retailer in the country. A few months back, a tech support rep got in trouble for turning on a woman's webcam without her permission. Then, last month, the company got nabbed knowingly shipping faulty PCs. And, just this week, the Texas-based manufacturer was caught shipping motherboards infected with ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2010/07/21/indian-phone-scammers-pose-as-microsoft-technicians-plant-malwa/'; Kolkata may be the land of elaborate Durga Pujas, cinematic legend Satyajit Ray and coronary-inducing kati rolls, but the Eastern Indian metropolis is also the land of a virulent phone scam that's been quietly making its way around the world for the past two years. As the ...

You know the drill. Buy a laptop, grab the requisite warranty and tech support guarantee, and then spend endless minutes of your life on the line with said tech support every time your new baby starts to sputter. Why, you may ask yourself, is my laptop's tech support so gosh darn un- supportive? Well, Laptop Magazine did some extensive research on the subject, contacting tech support units at ...

The word "adorable" doesn't do justice to the telephone conversation you're about to hear. An old woman named Lorraine recently called a tech-support hotline to ask how to "disable" the annoyingly noisy Pac-Man display that Google embedded on its home page a couple weeks back. In a nearly six-minute back-and-forth with an incredibly patient guy named Brian, the elderly woman tries her darndest to ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. Hard to believe, but e-mail spam is well on its way to the big four zero. Obnoxious, all-caps spam is well past the big three oh. Thirty two years ago, Gary Thuerk ...

With President Bush forever out of office, and the hook from "Paper Planes" permanently etched in our minds, Sri Lankan musician-political activist-new mommy M.I.A. found herself in need of new inspiration for her next album. After spanning the globe and singing about heavy things like school-aged Liberian soldiers on 2007's "Kala," she's reportedly gone back to something just a tad more mundane ...

Proving that it's no longer restricted to the domain of toilet seat treatment, the great gender divide has extended to the world of technology, as well. The BBC reports that women are substantially more likely to read the instruction manual for a given product before calling for assistance, according to a recent survey conducted by the phone tech-help service Gadget Helpline. The survey of ...

In her role as the gentle matriarch of 'The Brady Bunch,' Florence Henderson served as a model for parents in the Baby Boomer generation, the first in American history to deal extensively with divorce, remarriage, and stepchildren. Bringing old-fashioned values to bear on the changing social landscape of the '70s, Henderson did a lot more as Carol Brady than to simply provide corny jokes and ...

It's no secret that tech support and customer service, in general, are deep black-holes of wasted time and unsolved problems. What you may not realize is that there are actual reasons for tech support's frequent suckiness. For example, call centers are staffed with the absolute minimum number of agents, in order to save costs. And, while it may be annoying to be asked if your PC is plugged in ...

We've seen Android, Google's mobile OS, on a Mini-Note, and we've seen it on an Eee PC, but we never thought in a million years that we'd ever see Android on mom's hat. Looking for a way to simplify his mother's regular tech support calls (the universal remote often throws her for a loop) Dan O'Sullivan dreamt up his Camera Hat for Complicated Televisions. The whole megillah consists of an ...

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project is constantly filling our lives with fascinating numbers and stats we never knew we cared about. For example, did you know that young people and men are much more likely to remain calm and optimistic in the event of a technological meltdown? We don't want to spend to much time sweating the details, so here are some quick bullet ...

For those of you out there who have or had tech-support jobs, most of this will just sound like another day at the office. For those on the other side of the phone, this might be a little enlightening. You might not be aware of just how infuriating, difficult, and hilarious your calls and questions can be. Robert Half Technology, an IT contracting firm, asked CIOs (Chief Information Officers) ...

Conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, we all know the frustration of computer bugs and unanswered pleas for tech support. Case in point: conservative radio talk personality Rush Limbaugh made a public plea to Apple CEO (and Democrat) Steve Jobs on his broadcast last week for help with a problem he's encountered with his collection of networked, high-end Mac Pro computers. "El Rushbo" ...