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Mobile Magazine's Notebook Tech Support Reviews
antdude writes "Mobile Magazine tested companies' technical support for their notebooks/laptops. Each test had three calls to each of ten major notebook manufacturers (added three additional vendors since last year). Also, called three third-party providers of PC help. On the whole, what they found was a sea of ignorance -- and annoying fixation with pinning down our name, address, and serial numbers. Things haven't gotten any better since our 2004 test -- and most of the vendors we tested have actually gotten worse..."
If your going to keep my on hold and listening to music, please dear god stop interupting the songs every 15-20 seconds with an automated voice giving me a sales pitch, or thanking me for being a customer, or assuring me a tech is working on the problem. Let me listen to the damn music uninterrupted while I wait.
On the plus side, one tech support line, ( I think it was 3com) had a voice at the start of the hold cue that said, Press 1 for classical music, Press 2 for Jazz, Press 3 for classic rock.... That was pretty nice
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
These problems are even more ridiculous when you look at what they did to their apple laptop. As a reference point, Apple has the highest ranked Tech Support by Consumer Reports for both desktops and laptops. In one phone call, they decided this was not the case--apparently conducting surveys of thousands of people is unnecessary.
They also chose different problems for the mac--booting off a non-existent network drive? How is this even remotely a real-world problem? Furthermore, holding down option while rebooting lets you choose the drive your computer will boot from--which is a fix for the problem. If they reset the preference after they booted so that it broke again, that's not Apple's fault.
Misconfiguring wi-fi is also an amazingly horrible test. There's no way to know what settings someone's wireless network and router use, unless you're the LAN administrator. Apple was more than correct to refer them to the manufacturer of the router--could you tell me, right now, what my IP, DNS, Gateway, and hostmask settings should be? What about the SSID and password for my router?
The test was stupidly conducted, and worse yet, only conducted once. Their results were meaningless.