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It's been a long time since my last editorial. That's because in December of 2002 my wife gave birth to our daughter Chantel. Not to say that things really aren't "business as usual", but a lot of the time I had previous spent writing before going to bed has been spent reading to my baby at night. We've already read Christopher A. Crayton's A+ Adaptive Exam guide and we've begun on Michael Jung's Linux+ Exam Cram.
Some have thought that I had gone dry of material. Trust me. As long as there are end users, there's material.
There’s nothing wrong with asking someone for help; even if you’re asking me for help. But before you ask a professional for help with the computer you had just built from the ground up, please make sure you have read the manuals first.
I’m telling you this because I’ve been on the side of the equation that has had to say the infamous “RTFM” phrase to someone that would rather believe that one of their components is bad, instead of believing that they had made a mistake.
I think I know why my work doesn’t want me working with customers at the front counter anymore. A customer came in with the computer and told me that it didn’t post. I looked inside the case and saw an Asus P4PE with three sticks of double-sided 512MB DDR RAM installed. He claimed that he must have a dead board or CPU because the board did not POST.
As I was hooking his machine up to the test bench, I asked him if he had tried to invoke a beep code by removing all of the RAM or by removing the video card. He said no. I then asked him if he tried to use the computer with only one of the sticks of RAM installed. He said no. So I’ve got a guy here that doesn’t know the first thing about troubleshooting, but he’s going to build his own PC. Great!
Next, I asked him if he had read the manual. He looked at me with a rather perturbed look on his face and said, “Why?”
“You have too much RAM in this machine, sir.” I respond.
“But Asus advertises this board as being able to support 1.5GB and that’s what I have in it!”
I grabbed an Asus P4PE manual, flipped it to page 2-11 and turned it towards the customer so he could read it. “If you look here in the middle of this page, you’ll see that the board has three DIMM slots, but only supports up to four banks of RAM. A double-sided stick of DDR is considered two banks. It even says so right here in case you didn’t already realize that. If we look at your machine, you’ll see that you have three double-sided sticks of RAM in there. That would make six banks.”
I pulled one of the sticks of RAM out of the machine; hit the power button and the computer fired right up.
“Well,” he said, “If the 512MB sticks of RAM are double sided, how am I supposed to get 1.5GB in the machine?”
I responded, “Single sided sticks of 512MB, that’s how. We don’t sell them and I haven’t seen them myself, but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere. You might want to ask Asus, but seeing how their web site only shows 256MB sticks of RAM as being qualified, I’m not too sure that they’re going to have that much to say.
He shut the machine down, grabbed the PC and stormed out of the store.
Now, I typically enjoy helping people. But I am a little short on patience when I’m trying to help someone that can’t help himself. Read the manual and put forth just a little bit of effort and then working together to solve a problem can potentially be a joy.
One frustration I deal with is people that can’t seem to ever get to the point.
Sometimes I will get some pretty outlandish emails that we like to call “novels” in the tech room. A novel does not always mean a long-winded email either. To be a novel, one must color their email with events of the day that have absolutely nothing to do with the reason why they are emailing technical support in the first place.
Here’s an example of a novel:
“One day I was painting my grandmother’s house. She’s rather old so she can’t paint it herself, so she called me up and asked me to drive over and do it for her. The house used to be white, but she felt that maybe a nice shade of light blue might improve the value of the home. While I was carrying my supplies around to the back of the house, I saw the dog lying motionless on the ground. I set down my brush, my paint can and my ladder and walked over to the dog. Much to my surprise, the dog was dead. I was rather sad as this dog had been in the family for nearly 20 years and I have grown very attached to her. I ran inside the house to tell my grandmother about the tragedy. My grandmother was in the laundry room, which is past the kitchen and on the other side of the dining room. To get to it, I have to walk through the living room. The living room is where my grandmother’s computer is located. As I walked past the computer, I noticed a blue screen of death up on the monitor.”
Of course, this is not an actual email, but it’s very much like some of the emails that I will get from time to time. I’m dead serious.
About three quarters of the way through such an email, the customer may begin to mention what troubleshooting they did or what component they figured out to be the cause of their problems, but when I’ve got about 50 more emails in my mailbox that need tending to and 90% of those emails are only one to two paragraphs long, I may miss some of the more important information conveyed in the novel because I’ll tend to skim.
“Did you reinstall Windows?” I will ask.
“As I said in page three, paragraph four of my original email;” the customer would respond, “Yes, I did reinstall Windows.”
Some of the customers I get just love to come to their own conclusions about what kinds of problems they are having and what’s causing them instead of emailing or calling tech support with the symptoms they are experiencing and leaving the troubleshooting to the professionals.
One such customer sent an email stating that there must be a problem with his AGP video card because Windows XP was saying it was a PCI card. I asked him to clarify what this meant, but all he could say was that the card was AGP and XP said it was PCI and that he’s already installed the newest drivers so he thinks the video card must be bad.
The guy seemed pretty confident that sending the video card back was the thing to do, so I pulled up his invoice, found what video card he bought from us as well as the motherboard he bought, issued him an RMA number and told him to send it back.
Once we received the video card, we popped it in a machine on the test bench and fired it up. We installed the drivers for the video card, reboot and ran video diagnostics on the card. The OS properly recognized the video card and the machine ran as to be expected. We boxed the video card back up and shipped it back to the customer.
About a week later, we received another email from the gentleman. The email stated that there was a compatibility issue between the video card and the motherboard. Knowing what kind of motherboard and video card we were talking about, I responded back with “The motherboard and video card you have purchased are compatible with each other.”
The customer responded, “Well, I had sent this video card back because XP stated that the card was PCI, but you all tested it and said it was good so I think the problem must be that the video card is not compatible with the motherboard.”
I’ve got to find out where this guy’s train of thought is coming in from, so I asked him where in Windows XP he was seeing the AGP video card as a PCI video card. He told me that in the device manager the display adapter is showing up on the PCI bus.
“Sir, your AGP video card IS on the PCI bus. That doesn’t make it a PCI card. Why don’t you tell me what kind of problem you are having instead of drawing your own conclusions?”
“Ok.” He said, “Whenever I play a movie, I get an error and I’m dumped to the desktop. Whenever I play a game, the machine locks up.”
Great. Now that I have symptoms I can actually test for the symptoms and figure out what the problem is myself.
“Ok, sir.” I respond, “You may have a defective motherboard, but I don’t know for sure until I test it. I would like for you to send back the motherboard, but also the video card. Let me ask you about the CPU and the RAM because I don’t see where you bought these items from us.”
“Well, all of my parts are from my old machine which worked perfectly with Windows 98. I was only upgrading the motherboard and video card because I wanted USB 2.0 and AGP 8X.”
Of course, Windows 98 doesn’t tell you what bus a video card is on when you look in the device manager so that explains why he reacted when he saw this once he installed Windows XP, but instead of thinking that THIS was the cause of his problems or was a problem within itself, he should have come right out and said, “Hey…. I’m having such and such problem.”
Getting to the point seems to be something that quite a few people have a problem with. Some of the emails I get will say, “Yeah, I bought a motherboard from you. I replaced the CPU and RAM and that didn’t help. I then tried the video card and power supply in another computer and they worked in it. Can you help?”
“Umm, sir.” I’ll respond. “What kind of problem are you having?