Ask Slashdot: Good Subscription-Based Solution For PC Tech Support?

New submitter byrddtrader writes: My parents are getting close to the their 70s and neither one of them is particularly tech savvy. Since my teenage years I have been tech support for the family, but now that I am older I can not be at their beck and call every time they inadvertently download something they should not, or the printer stops working. Given the amount of time that I have worked with them I don't feel that it is realistic that I will be able to convey the information they need to become self-sufficient. What I am looking for is a service that will be able to assist with any software PC related issues, viruses, printers and the like. Currently they are using a tech firm out of India (iYogi) that does unlimited support for a few hundred per year per machine -- which is fine, though they are big on the up-sell. They tend to push their own virus protection software, and attempted to sell my Dad, who has 500Mb of documents, a 3Tb external hard drive because they said he needed it. Currently the computers they use are ones I have built. Maybe the best solution would be store-bought PCs that offer additional tech support at a price. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Comments

Re:buy apple, macs don't need service

[Ol Olsoc]

Typical distortion-field bullshit. For a decade Apple says that PowerPC is better than Intel, then as soon as they switch all of a sudden it was never about the hardware.

Insightful?

Siddown, and le Uncle Ol give ya some learnin' Cuz you got yerself a mighty fine distortin' field going yourself, if I do say so.

The PowerPC was a mighty fine piece of CPU. But there was one really big problem with it. 'n it were a doozie.

It was too damn big. I had me a dual core G5 Powermac back in th' 2 ought ought 5 day, and the heat sink and the CPU were around the size of a Mac mini.

It generated a lot of heat too, I had 4 fans in the damn thing, and when I was doing 3-D rendering, it was like a Thunderscreech takin' off. Okay, I exaggerate, a 707.

But it was a fine piece of computin' at the time.

But those honkin' CPU's were hell to fit inside a Macbook - they were a nuisance inside a G5 iMac as well, generatin' plenty of heat. And IBM never ever came up with a small enough PowerPC CPU. Even if they could stuff one in a happy, jus imagine all that heat a-crispin yer testicles up. Yowee!

Soooo, old Apple, they just figgerd that rather than fall behind in the pony power department in it's laptops, and that IBM was never gonna smallify them G5 chips enough - they done went Intel, and they done went to Unix.

Shore made Uncle Ol happy when they done did that.

And now you know.........The rest of the story. - Apologies to Paul Harvey.