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Tech Tips: Clues for the Clueless

Are you a computer user?  If so, today’s post is aimed squarely at that bullseye on your forehead.  Tech people already know the list below by heart, but the common user seems to be oblivious to the following 10 tips on how to get better tech support.  This list was put together by me based on my own experiences in tech support of corporate clients.  If you re-use this, please link back to this site.

Here’s my Top Ten list of things to consider when you need tech support:

1. If you want our help, please get up from the chair and let us get access to the PC.  This is an immediate clue as to the intelligence level of a given user if they ask for help but don’t think to get up and let us work.  If you really want to piss us off when we ask to see your PC, just swivel the keyboard around and stay seated that way we have to balance on one foot to keep from touching the unholiness that is your presence which is dumb enough to think that this actually helps.  We don’t want to catch whatever you have.
2. Hovering over our shoulders while we work is not only irritating but often times distracting.  Unless we specifically need your input or are trying to show you how to do something… give us space.  We don’t need you to constantly take the mouse out of our hands to show us things that are completely irrelevant to the problem at hand.  Also, unless we are really close friends, we don’t need to hear all about your family and where you went on vacation while we are trying to fix your PC.  Hearing about your fantasy vacation to an elite resort on a private island could cause something unexpected.  Like your hard drive being mysteriously formatted.  I’m just saying….
3. Sitting in a chair across the desk from where we are working and continually whining about your deadline or lost data or missed appointment will not speed things up.  Crying will also not help.  It kinda freaks us out.  Just because you need your PC to be working right now does not alter the fact that it’s not working.
4. Please don’t call us for help with a problem and give us no information to go on.  This is especially annoying when you tell us that your PC is down when in fact, you just have Internet Explorer set to Work Offline and nothing more.  Better yet, call me in the middle of the night and tell me that the network is down because you can’t get your e-mail from home.  There are about 8,326,287,491 possible causes of this problem and only one of those is the network being completely down.  OMG.
5. If you are getting error messages on your PC, please please please take a screen-shot of that message or at least write it down.  Don’t be that user that just automatically clicks OK on every pop-up no matter what it was and then wonder why nothing is working.  Those error messages are sometimes clues as to the problems you are having.  They are important.  At least read them.
6. If you’re going to drop your PC off on our desks, leave something that will give us a clue as to what we are looking at.  I’ve found unlabeled notebook PCs sitting on my desk or chair before with no note, no name, no contact number, no indication of a problem… nothing.  Then at the end of the day So-and-So will call asking if their PC is fixed.  The answer is always going to be NO.  At least leave a Post-It note with your name or number so we know who to call to find out why we have an orphan in our office.  Even a snapshot of you with your dog would be more desirable than nothing if you can’t be bothered to write even your own name.
7. If you know that you will be getting a new PC setup at your desk take a minute or two to clean up around the hardware that will be replaced.  If you aren’t sure what will be replaced, then just clean it all up.  That includes removing all the Post-It notes, toys, pictures, shwag, stickers, make-up, food, mobile phone adapters, USB aquariums, etc. that are obviously going to be in the way of us helping you change your equipment.  Or if that’s too much trouble, then don’t complain when you find all your precious “stuff” swept off to the edge of your desk in a ball of clutter that would make the King of the Cosmos weep with pride.
8. If your PC is having a problem and we ask you if you installed anything on the PC - don’t lie.  We are not that stupid.  You’re only making yourself look bad when you lie about things like that.  More than likely we, or someone on our team, built that PC you are now using.  So when we look at the problem computer and see that Yahoo Instant Messenger, Ask Toolbar, 1001 Smileys, Free Animal ScreenSaver, Bejeweled, Nokia Mobile Connect, etc. are installed on your PC we not only know that you lied but you have given us proof.  Everything installed on a PC can potentially change how the whole system works.  We don’t just ask this for fun.  If you lie it’s not going to change the reality of what you did.  Just be honest.  We may think you are ignorant for not knowing better but at least you can look us in the eye with some sense of dignity.
9. If you don’t like an answer you’ve received to your PC questions, then by all means ask for explanations or clarifications.  Not all tech people are as open and friendly as I am.  Many techs have the social skills of a badger suffering from crack withdrawals.  Sometimes you may need more info.  But whatever you do, DO NOT get angry with us if we have worked on your problems and given you an honest answer that you just don’t like.  The best way to ensure that you will never receive quality tech support again is to yell and scream at the servicing technician because there is no way for them to recover your files off a crashed hard drive or a failed USB thumb drive.  Threatening our jobs because you don’t think we’ve done our jobs right, even though we’ve told you that what you are asking for is impossible, will also not get you very far.  Even if you succeeded in getting that particular tech fired, you will quickly run out of IT people when they all give you the same answer.  Attend some anger management classes but do not take out your problems on the tech.
10. You don’t need us to do or see every single thing that happens on your PC.  If you got a message in Internet Explorer that said it will be showing you both secure and unsecure items, yeah OK, no problem.  That’s normal.  If your screen flickered once and never again… probably a fluke or you kicked the power cord under your desk.  And if you get an error or warning message on your PC that comes complete with an explanation of the problem you are having and instructions on how to fix that problem then by all means please try it out.  Not only does it save time and gives you a certain sense of pride that you were able to fix your own computer problem but it also keeps you from wasting our time.  Many programs do offer fixes for the problems that can arise.  Most developers also make these message “dummy-proof” so even the most computer illiterate person can understand and follow the instructions.  We are not here to hold your hand every time the computer beeps.  It’s not scary.  It will be OK.

There you go.  That ended up being a lot longer than I had thought it would be.  I think the next Tech Tips will cover the opposite angle and focus on the techs themselves.  Users are always to blame but we have to share some of the burden sometimes.  Sometimes.

Colors & Shapes

Here’s something I made while just having some fun with Adobe Illustrator.  Nothing fancy, I was just playing around and thought I’d share the results.

There’s still alot of things that I prefer Photoshop for but Illustrator is really growing on me.  If only I could merge my favorite features of both applications….

Meh.

Mixed up PCs

For as long as I’ve been with this company they have been using only Dell computers and servers.  Recently though our parent company has decided that all companies under it’s umbrella must start purchasing and using HP computers and servers.  I don’t mind HP at all but this shift in hardware was not thought out other than to make this mandate and then leave people wondering: How?

We have no corporate or global agreement with HP like we do with Dell.  We have no standardized pricing and discounts like we currently enjoy.  And so far, it looks like the first HP notebook I’ve ordered is going to take at least three weeks to arrive.  Unlike Dell which takes, at most, a week.  Someone should have thought about this just a little more.

Now add to this that we also have to deal with Lenovo on some projects so we have to be able to buy Lenovo notebooks as well.  I just received a brand new Thinkpad X61s this morning (which was ordered one week after the HP) and have started removing the bloatware.  Thinkpads have always been notorious for putting tons of extra crap into their computer builds that no one will ever use.  It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

I just ordered six PCs from Dell last week.  They are all here already.  I think I’ll just worry about HP later.

Thursday Tech Tips

I had a user setting up his notebook at the last second in a conference room full of expectant visitors.  When his notebook wouldn’t connect to the room’s built-in projector it seems that he went and grabbed our nice Dell portable projector.  When that didn’t work and the meeting was two minutes overdue to start, they finally came running to me.

Unfortunately, this left me with no time to help him with the problem he was having with connecting to external displays.  The only thing I could do was grab a spare Dell notebook on the way out of my office and have him copy his presentations to it so he could continue on with the meeting.  Problem not solved but crisis averted.

Today he tells me that he’s leaving on the weekend for a week and he needs that functionality to work and he won’t be able to let Dell have the laptop before then to fix it.  Uhh….  So I dredged through my rusty databank of a mind and remembered that I kept seeing a little graphic pop-up each time he hit Fn+F8 and it said “Presentation Mode: OFF.”  I remember thinking that that wasn’t right but couldn’t troubleshoot it at the time.

I contacted Dell Support and of course they can’t do much without me having the PC in front of me, but they did give me a hint that I thought might work.  There’s a Dell QuickSet application that runs in the background and gives some control over certain system settings and functions.  So I got the PC for a few minutes and checked QuickSet and sure enough, there’s a Display setting that, if unchecked, will not allow you to use external displays.  Presentation Mode was indeed turned off.

So I checked the box to enable Presentation Mode and tested it with an external LCD monitor and a HD Plasma TV in the conference room.  Imagine that…   it works now.  Not so hard of a fix after all.  But how did it get set like that in the first place?  That I can’t answer… yet.  I have two new D630s sitting here in my office though and I intend to see what their default settings are on this.

So that’s the first tech tip for today.  The second one is more of a common sense tip that should be obvious after reading the above.  If you need help with your PC, please… for the love of all that’s silicon, give us technical people a little time to fix your problem.  Asking for help at the last possible second is the worst time to do so.  Especially when you knew the problem existed previously.

Probably a bad thing

I… I am weak.  I’ve reactivated my World of Warcraft account.  After almost a year of not playing, I finally got drawn back in.  Well, Yoshi had a lot to do with that.  He’s evil like that.  He’s such an enabler.  And now I’m trying to get Muse to re-activate her account.  *sigh*

I know I make it sound bad but its really not.  It’s just what seems to be expected when someone admits that they are getting back into an online game that they used to play.  I don’t see it as a weakness or an evil in the least.  It’s just a game.  It can be a bit addictive at times and it certainly is a time sink, but it’s really no worse than spending hours playing “casual” games from PopCap or Reflexive.  I would just as easily spend 3 hours playing Peggle as I would Warcraft.

Anyway, if you are playing WoW and are on the Lothar server, leave a comment with your character name and I’ll see if I can find you.  However, if you play one of those evil, under-handed Alliance then I may have to try and hurt you.  Fair warning.

The mobile web

I just attended a luncheon regarding the rising opportunities in the online mobile phone markets and it was pretty interesting.  I found out the the average youth user in China sends an average of 100 text messages a day.  That’s just sending!  Considering I’d never sent a text message in my life prior to coming to Hong Kong, that just seems inconceivable to me.

However, the focus of the presentation was about the youth market and how it’s affecting and shaping the mobile web.  Basically the premise is that the kids today are deciding and driving the technology and services available on mobile devices and us old folks will just get whatever they decide on.  Lucky us.  The 2 second attention span generation has come to power.

Supposedly, 50 Cent and young Japanese girls have something in common.  They are doing something called Lifecasting.  They basically wear their phones around their necks and let it record constantly throughout their day and it auto transmits these images or video to an online accessible site.  Personally, I’m not sure how I would feel about this but I guess it would keep Fiddy from doing illegal activities since he’d be broadcasting whatever he’s doing to the world.  The japanese girls will probably get flooded with dirty old men though.  But maybe that’s what they’re going for.

It sounds like more and more content on mobile devices will be branded as well.  Just like you can’t have a college bowl game without some companies name and logo plastered all over it.  Just like you can’t play certain video games without seeing billboards in the games advertising everything from soft drinks to cars.  Now your mobile content will also be branded.  Considering the size of the screens, I hope that you can still see what you were looking for with all those logos.

Of course since this meeting I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of making this site and A Little Scary more mobile friendly.  I found this Wordpress Mobile Plugin that looks like it makes your site mobile phone compatible and thought I might give it a try.  If anyone out there has any opinions on the matter, please leave them in the comments.

My computer is broke. Nuh-uh!

Dealing with technical support at the best of times can be difficult.  Dealing with tech support in Hong Kong can be absolutely infuriating.  The DVD-RW drive in my Dell XPS M1710 computer has been slowly dying for months but Friday it decided to give up completely.  This is a pretty fast PC but it would take six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD because it reset every two seconds.  Now it won’t even read a disk.

In a nutshell, here’s how the conversation went:
“My computer’s broke.”
“No it’s not, that’s normal.”

Yes tech support in Hong Kong will regularly flat out lie to try and keep from actually sending someone to fix something.  It’s not just Dell or even computers.  Getting service in Hong Kong is painful.

Actually the Dell Optiplex support line is pretty good and they speak English.  When you call the Dell XPS support line, you get transferred to Mainland China somewhere and they don’t speak English.  Knowing this, I had an admin make the call for me and warned her that they may not even speak guangdong hua (Cantonese).

Sure enough, the first person to answer speaks putong hua (Mandarin) only.  Luckily most of the local staff in my office are at least able to handle most conversations in Mandarin but they still get mixed up sometimes.  Oddly enough, the tech must not have liked the admin’s knowledge of his language because he hung up on her.  So she called back and luckily this time she got someone who speaks Cantonese.  Mind you, this is a Hong Kong phone number we’re dialing.

Instead of going through all the details of what happened, I’ll just give you the excuses that were translated to me.  There may have been more that I didn’t hear or understand.

• “Has Windows been re-installed?” - This insinuated that it’s not the drive but that Windows is the problem and needs to be re-installed.  No.
• When the call was made I had a burned copy of Symantec AV in the drive.  He told the admin that “there was just an incompatibility in the way that the burned disk had been created.”  So he told her she needed to put in a CD provided by Dell and if it worked then it wasn’t their problem.
• So I put in the XPS Drivers and Utilities Disk.  Standing near the PC you can hear the drive spin and reset over and over and over.  I told her to tell him about that noise.  He responded with: “That’s normal.”
• When the Dell CD didn’t come up, he had her try another Dell CD because it must be a problem with that CD.  We entered another one which made the same sounds and didn’t work.  He told her “the drivers weren’t loaded” even though we told him it’s been working for almost two years.  He had her check Device Manager and sure enough there was no Exclamation Point marking a problem.
• When I told her to tell him it took six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD-R, he started questioning the software we were using and blamed it on that.  He told her then that “the software you use is just not updated.”  By this point I was well beyond pissed and glad he couldn’t understand what I was saying on speakerphone.

The admin started getting confrontational with him at that point because he was wasting our time.  We had spent 30 minutes on the phone at that point.  Finally he relented and told us someone would contact us tomorrow to replace the drive.

Of course I thanked the admin since I’ve made similar calls before and they were just as painful except neither person understood the other.  Imagine trying to convey “video card” to someone who only speaks Mandarin and you only speak English.  Painful.

A flaw in Illustrator

I’m not sure why or how, but I seem to have run across a bug or flaw in Adobe Illustrator CS2. I noticed it while working on the next comic for A Little Scary. I changed no settings or procedures from the previous comics. I did every thing the same as usual but all the sudden when I would export my layout from Illustrator to Photoshop, some items would be blurry like they were run through Anti-Alias multiple times. I’ve tried multiple tests and settings and different ways of doing things but I get the same results.

But the odd thing is that the results are not consistent. I created a new AI file and drug the same character PSD into it twice from a Windows Explorer window (just like I normally would). Then I ALT+Clicked and drug each one to make a copy of each. So essentially four identical items all in one Layer in one brand new file. I exported it to PSD format for Photoshop CS2 (just like I normally would) and then opened it up in Photoshop. Two of the four were blurry and the other two were perfectly normal.

As you can see in this sample pic though, it’s not consistent as to which one is blurry.  At the top, the original is fine and the copy is blurry.  At the bottom of this same file, the original is blurry and the copy is fine.  I also tried just adding four different characters to a new Illustrator file and exporting that.  All but one of the characters was fuzzy even though they were all added the same way and all of these characters have been created in the exact same way.

If anyone has any ideas about this, please let me know.  It’s driving me crazy.

TypeRacer

I think there’s something wrong with me. I came across this simple web game called TypeRacer and actually found my competitive nature kicking in and making an otherwise productive day into a keyboard melting experience. And the odd thing is that it’s probably good for me.

The whole idea is that it gives you a paragraph from a book, movie or song that you have to type, accurately, as fast as you can. At the same time, other people are racing against you to type the paragraph faster. Little Volkswagen New Beetles race along the top of the screen to show the progress. The first to complete the paragraph with no mistakes wins. Then you go on to the next race.

The thing is that I nearly flunked my typing class when I was in high school.  I’ve gotten better with typing in my computer career but I still make plenty of mistakes.  But making typing into an on-line competition?  I’m already up to 60 words per minute!  Granted that’s in a short burst typing out one paragraph, but still - it’s improvement.

Of course there’s also a leaderboard that shows the fastest typers and obviously there are some robots that play this game too because I don’t hink it’s humanly possible to type at 217 words per minute.  Perhaps there’s a cheat like Aimbot for typing or something.  Who cares.  Try it out.

Inside a mouse’s balls

Yesterday, I got a bit distracted from my work.  I had a standard Dell USB optical mouse that I liberated from a users desk because it was so nasty and sticky that I refused to use it.  I gave them a new one.  But of course that left me with the nasty sticky mouse which also had smooth spots worn into the two mouse buttons.

I also had an even older Dell USB ball mouse that worked just fine but no one wants old style mice with balls.  It had a nice clean black top half and was the exact same size and shape as the optical version.  At least on the outside. So I thought I’d clean off the funk from the bottom of the optical mouse and put the nice black top from the ball mouse on that.  In theory it’s very simple.  In reality it’s really freaking hard.

Even though the outsides of the two mice were physically shaped the same, the insides were different.  There were plastic support posts and wiring in different locations in each mouse.  I used a straight blade to shave down plastic edges and cut off supports.  I had to rearrange some wiring and eventually use a little brute force to get the new hybrid mouse to close up.  I was only partially successful the first try as the right mouse button wouldn’t press.  The second try after a bunch more cutting was a complete success.  It’s a pretty sharp looking mouse now with it’s flat black top and it’s smoky opaque bottom.

Then of course, I have to completely disassemble the remaining parts.  Which of course starts with removing the old mouse ball.  It made me realize that optical mice were probably the best thing to ever happen because mouse balls were stolen constantly.  I have no idea why or what people did with all those stolen balls but every store you went in with a PC on display, you’d try and move the mouse and immediately find that the ball was gone.  Even attempts at gluing the ball in rarely had the desired effect.  Optical mice changed all that of course and those damn ball thieves were thwarted once and for all.  You know who you are.

A new thought occured to me once I got the mouse ball.  Why is it so heavy?  I never thought about before when mouse balls were the only choice, but now that I hadn’t handled a mouse ball for so long, I was intrigued by it’s weight.  I bounced it against my wood-like desk and it popped like a metal sound.  So I decided to see for myself.  I grabbed the straight blade and started slicing it around it’s circumference.  I thought it might be metal inside but once that razor sharp blade starting grinding against something that set my teeth on edge I knew it was.

So there’s a metal ball bearing hidden inside there.  That also explains why old mice feel so much more substantial than new optical mice and also why some high end gaming manufacturers have started putting weights in their new mice.  It makes a big difference.

Perhaps you’ve never wondered about this and certainly don’t care now that the age of eunuch mice has taken over, but now you know.  And knowing is half the battle.  Considering that quote is from G.I. Joe, I can only assume that the other half the battle is the guns, explosives, killing, wounding, etc.  They never really said.