Morons to the left of me - morons to the right of me.
Well, I am sorry for flipping out again but this takes the cake.
I called the tech support dept. for one of my applications
(Incredimail - which is an email client) and spoke to a tech person.
First of all these outsourced tech people are mostly foreign
but this one had a terrible heavy accent - he was difficult to
understand. Anyway, I carefully explained the problem I was having
which amounted to NOT being able to send a forwarded email.
I did notice that a pop-up window said something about a problem
with a .dll file (something like IM*****U.dll - cannot remember the full
name) which I explained to the tech. I did notice that another
pop-up message issued by McAfee. I also told the tech about this.
So, the first thing he said that the .dll file was corrupted and I should
bring the computer to a computer repair shop. I told him I don't have
to do that as I am a pc technician. So then he said he needed the ip address
of my router - WHAT??? What the hell does this have to do with the .dll file?
Yeah he said I should go to the router ( it's in my basement) and look at
the bottom of the linksys router to obtain the ip address. I told him that
there is no ip address on the bottom of the router. So he suggested I
sign up for a remote session (Cost: $100) - and I said "are you kidding"
the total cost of the product is far less than that and I said that's just
plain nuts, at which point he hung up the phone.
Well, as it turns out I poked around the Incredimail program and the "about"
option had a button to click on to "check for updates". I did this and lo and
behold it downloaded an update so my product was now up to date. I also
uninstalled the McAfee (worthless) program. Not even sure how it was installed
but sometimes it can get loaded if you had already installed another app. It
is easy to miss the little check off box during an app installation. Anyway,
after removing McAfee and getting my mail client up to date - all worked again.
No need for an ip address - no need for a remote $100 sesssion - and this took
all of 5 minutes. Bingo! And just an aside - I probably get correct help from
an offshore tech about 10% of the time - and the same is true about help
from the internet - ie, most so called fixes work about 5% of the time.
The problem is, that most people try to fix things by mostly guessing. Damn it
if you don't really know a fix then stop guessing - all it does is make us the
computer community even more frustrated. Phooey!
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