[charles849]

I find it very annoying when you visit a "Support" site which dumps you into a forum with other people with the same problem. That is not support; that is a company that doesn't want to pay for support.

AH man I thought this just happens to me recently windows one care live went south on me and they sent me to site with other people who didnt know what to do .it wasnt until I went to uninstall that I found the telephone number eventually I got my money back and srambled and found free apps that basically did the same thing for free.

[lodave]

Recently I've "passed" on purchasing several software titles online, sometimes trialware that has expired (requiring purchase to continue

full functionality) or simply some program that was recommended and that I thought would be worth the purchase price.

Why didn't I buy them? Because in addition to the purchase price which I was willing to pay, the sales fullfillment agency

wanted to charge an additional $7.95 or whatever for "download assurance" or some other gobbledegook euphasim for a ripoff annual fee!

. If I have paid for a piece of software and saved the company the price of packaging and mailing by downloading it, I should be

getting a DISCOUNT and not be gouged for a phony "service" to ensure that I can can download it again if some hard disk malfunction

or other mishap corrupts. If the software companies choose to farm out their online sales and distribution to a fullfillment service, fine,

but the customer shouldn't have to pay extra for their savings! The public should contact the software companies and tell

them just why they have lost a sale!

[noprem]

"Registered mail" (Rebate Runarounds; p. 85 print) isn't necessary to "prove the fulfillment company received it". Certified mail does delivery confirmation for less money. The big difference is that all registered travels under lock and key; hardly worth the trouble or expense. And all Postal Service "special" mail can now be tracked online.

[aebcomp]

Hey, there's a perfectly good solution to the silly Quicken sunset problem. Use Quicken 2003 and QIF files and forget the rest of the Intuit junk! No way that banks etc will insult you as Intuit does by stopping the production of the QIF files. And by all means, let your financial institutions know how important those files are to you. And stop doing auto upgrades on everything...most of the time just don't do it. Hey, did you know that Acrobat reader 7.0 is fine? As a happy MS Office 97 user, with many Access and Excel applications, I can tell you it can be done. Just stop the upgrading!

[CaptainKern]

I want to defend a few companies. I have been e mailing HP for a few weeks back and forth about a problem with a 6 year old Pavillion. (CD and DVD drives crashed) I get the automated response, then, less than a day later I got a detailed anaylsis of my problem(s) and steps to fix. None of the steps have worked so far but the more complicated ones are too technical for me to try. I wish I cou;d get phone support but the PC is out of warranty by years. On the other hand, Sony Vaio LIVE phone support continues helping me with a problem that began toward the end of the year and is now into 4 months out of warranty. I had complained heartily the last day of the warranty that it's so unfair to cut people off after a year with a new OS (Vista) that has has so many compatibility issues. I wasn't able to install the software (drivers) for my new Sony Camcorder and new HP printer, bought the same month as the Sony Vaio Laptop for over SIX MONTHS and it still doesn't work perfectly. I had the Sony person write a letter on my behalf about the OS hassles and continuous upgrades, downloads, etc. and they extended the phone support for 3 months. I'm more upset about Microsoft. The one time I called Microsoft about a white screen on Windows Explorer the first thing the girl asked, before even a hello was "what's your credit card number, this call is $54.99". (each call whether resolved or not) They're not even human.

McAfee is impossible to get off my older computer. Trend Micro is screwed up and I told them so. I bought Sony laptop at Best Buy, paid them $129 to 'optimize' and put in the 2 programs they sell: Spysweeper and Trend Micro. Upon renewing each one online after a year (could have bought the CD cheaper for TM) I found out that TM put in Antispyware with the Antivirus. It took days of phone calls, e mails to straighten out this mess, to take out the antispyware with TM having to take over my mouse during the process. When I asked why Best Buy sells them separately I was told it's a marketing thing. When I asked TM why you can't renew JUST the antivirus portion, they said it's a communication problem with their software dept. Both programs have been working on both computers, no problem with Spysweeper but TM sends me a message that my subscriftion expired on the older computer, and put in the WRONG expiration date. I know you are supposed to pay extra for a second computer, but it shouldn't be with the prices they charge for renewing online. Thanks for listening.

[Elvenstar]

As a former tech support rep for home users at Dell, I have to agree on the fact that business customers always get better service... But unfortunately the real problem with this service is the third party companies Dell hires to "fix" the problem. They actually suck pretty bad...

About the scripts and the sort: they are MANDATORY, and the company demands that you go STEP BY STEP on the procedures even if the customer has done it a thousand times. If you don't follow the questions in the order they appear in the screen, your supervisor will give you hell...

You're also supposed to stay with the customer a max number of minutes and then close the call, because what they care about is the number of calls you take a day, not the number of problems you solve...

And these were a few of my favorite things, and the main reasons why a don't work there anymore (and wouldn't buy a Dell computer for the world)