Posted on: Wednesday, February 28, 2001
Online first aid
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
The "Help" files have been dissected. The voice-mail hell of telephone tech support has been endured and abandoned. The repair geeks at the computer store beckon, but — ouch! — the prospect of shelling out a few hundred bucks sure does smart.
Surely there’s a last-ditch cheap or free solution to your computer glitch woes. For the stout-hearted, there is: Go to the Web and search for information and help.
This is no enterprise for the newbie: "I’ll fix it myself" can be the most dangerous mantra for the inexperienced.
"A lot of times the resolution is technical," said Matthew Griffin, a technician at SuperGeeks, among the hired guns in the Hardware Wars. "At best they can print it out and show someone an idea of how to fix it. . . . You can totally hose your computer if you don’t do it right."
But it’s not always the mind-bending scavenger hunt the computer user might imagine, either. There is a range of Internet resources to help the amateur computer nursemaid, starting with the countless tech bulletin boards and newsgroups where people post their problem and hope someone reading it has the answer.
At that end of the spectrum, it is like a scavenger hunt, since most boards purge old messages so that chances are slim a visitor will find an exact match. "It’s very effective if you have somewhat common problems," said Peter Kay, host of a computer radio series. "If there's a common bug in a piece of software, probably someone has experienced it and posted a response online."
For those requiring a little more guidance, however, there are sites such as Expertcity (www.expertcity.com), where you can submit your problem to be solved by the highest bidder. The site promises it will support Macintosh questions in the future, but for the moment it, like many help sites, is a Windows-only service.
It’s not free, but it’s competitive — literally. After registering with the site, you submit your question, and within two minutes bids come in from techs guaranteeing they will either solve your problem or waive their fee (a secure site’s in place to handle credit-card transactions).
The Advertiser submitted a request based on the personal PC woes of a staff member, and six bids rolled in, charging between $10 and $25.
Before choosing the expert, a user can read reviews from other users. "Nice guy," wrote one visitor following a session, then added that the expert "didn’t seem to know as much as he projected on his resume."
Once connected with the expert, the customer can allow remote viewing and control of his computer by the expert, while conversing through a chat window. People with a separate telephone line can talk with the expert by phone; that option, however, is only available in the 48 contiguous states.
Expertcity.com promises that experts only will view computer files the user decides to display on the screen, but clearly some information is transmitted in the background. One expert responded to our inquiry by observing that the request had come from a Macintosh computer, something we had not told him; evidently, the experts can view a visiting computer’s operating system, at least.
At other help sites, the user may be asked to surrender more specific data. The paper also floated a question about Windows Millennium Edition at the Microsoft help site (support.microsoft.com/support/webresponse.asp). Users of various Microsoft programs are allowed two free online queries.
The test submission, concerning an error message displayed after the computer powers up, produced a reply within 24 hours from Leeson Wang, engineer for Microsoft Windows Online Support. Wang suggested a fix, but that didn’t solve the problem so he said it would not be counted as a successful query.
The site requires users to register for a "passport" sign-on, and then to upload selected technical computer files for examination.
Wang told The Advertiser via e-mail that he’s unsure how customers feel about giving up the data but added that some opt against sending it along.
"If we can get the information we want from the customers, then we are able to resolve the problems within fewer days," he wrote. "Certainly, for some customers, we need to tell them how to find that information very carefully and in great detail, thus may take some more time to handle the issue."
Privacy concerns do represent a demerit against online help sites, but people are growing less sensitized to invasive computer probing, said Jamie Mather, a Honolulu computer consultant.
Mather said he’s never used a site that troubleshoots hardware but is a fan of one that will check a user’s own Web site for errors and links that don’t work (linkalarm.com is one of these).
He’s hesitant about opening hard drives to inspection over the Net, citing similar reluctance among some consumers, particularly because the data-gathering can proceed without their knowledge. A site may be requesting information for registering software, for example, and meanwhile might access other files from a user’s computer.
"I’m a little wary because there’s so much customer information that can be obtained," he said.
"I’m of two minds here," he added. "One part says, ‘Get over the old notion of privacy; it’s gone’ . . . people have changed their notion of what is personal information.
"The other part says, ‘Yeah, it’s creepy when companies are feeling us out under another guise,’" he added. "The fact that they’re not forthcoming with their information bothers me. It doesn’t strike me as a trust-building practice."
Bryan Villados, a member of the Hawaii Macintosh Users Group, said the group runs an e-mail discussion group that can provide helpful free advice. And, like the Hawaii PC Users Group, it sponsors face-to-face sessions to help users jump through specific tech hoops.
But in general, he said, "I’d recommend people take the machine to a service center, even though it is expensive. In my prior experiences, the computer becomes less and less stable each time the user applies some sort of repair on their own.
"For example, performing disk defragmentation prior to checking for bad sectors can result in a much worse situation."
Sometimes the problem eludes even the experts, Griffin added, and nothing on the Internet helps them, either.
"In situations like that, it’s time to back up (valuable files) and wipe it clean," he said. "A lot of time that’s the only way to fix problems."
Some Web sites that provide assistance
Here are a few online resources that might provide answers to a tech problem — or at least a few laughs. They’re free, except as noted.
LinkAlarm (linkalarm.com) checks every link on every page of your site, as a user might, and reports on which ones don’t connect with a working Web site.
The Trouble with Windows (www.windowstrouble.com) lets the vexed user type in the details of an error message and find the likely culprit.
At Your PC (yourpc.net.harddrives.html), visitors install a program, BelDrive, which checks various aspects of their (Windows) hard disk drive and alerts them if it detects a risk of failure.
Expertcity (expertcity.com) puts your complaint up for auction and then connects you with an expert of your choosing, who will "chat" you through the problem and can control your computer, remotely, to fix it.
Fees generally fall in the two-figure range.
Manufacturers. Both Apple (www.apple.com/support/) and Microsoft (support.microsoft.com/support/webresponse.asp) offer online support for their customers.
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