Defeating the no-help desk

When you’re a GNU/Linux or *BSD user, tech support can be a real hassle. Not technical support for your software — there are newsgroups, mailing lists, and message forums for that — but support for hardware and services that officially require Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. If your hard drive dies or your Internet connection goes out, the last thing you want is the support person to hang up on you because you’re using a free software operating system or some other “unsupported” variable in your computer or network. How can you successfully deal with clue-challenged phone support people?

Before you even make the call, always verify that the problem is not on your end of the line. Is everything plugged in tightly? Cords and cables can come loose with pressure, time, and thermal stress. Do you have spare cords you can try? Sometimes just unplugging everything and plugging it back in can solve mysterious problems due to intermittent connections.

Did you change anything in your operating system? Installing patches and updates can sometimes change configuration files, causing previously working software to stop functioning properly. Do you have a live CD available, such as FreeSBIE or Knoppix? If so, boot your system with it to see if the problem goes away.

If you’ve experienced catastrophic hardware failure and don’t know what part of the computer has gone wrong, you may want to contact a local technician to look at it if you’re not comfortable replacing parts on your own. If you have spare parts or other computers to test with, use them. If you think your monitor is bad, try it with another computer to make sure it’s not the video card. Narrow down the problem as best you can before you pick up the phone.

In some instances you may want to remove potentially trouble-causing variables from the equation. If you’ve got a router between your broadband modem and your computer, try removing it from the network and resetting the modem just to make sure that it’s the service, not the router.

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