Cleophus, I saw where he said he was not allowed, but he is the one railing on customers who just want to get their computers fixed. It is frustrating when no one will help you because it’s “not their job.”
My argument is that it should be his job. He should be telling management the same thing. You do not have to walk anyone through registry edits to fix this problem. All you have to do is tell them to go to Norton and follow the instructions there. Maybe add 5 seconds to it by saying that you’re not affiliated with Norton and cannot vouch for their products.
If he still cannot do this, he should be pitting his management, not customers. Most of them probably cannot get online long enough to actually look up what is happening or have the knowledge to fix what is happening. They can’t be blamed for wanting someone to help them with their problem.
What you will most likely have to do to save this installation of Windows is to do a parallel installation of Windows and then edit the registry on the first installation by loading the system hive into the registry editor in the parallel installation. Once you can access the registry on the original installation then you can modify the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl\AutoReboot value. It is probablly set to a value of 1. Change it to 0.
Then reboot back into the original installation and you will actually be able to see the blue screen error and troubleshoot it. The problem is that by default Windows install to automatically reboot on blue screen errors. It reboots to fast to see the blue screen error itself. Now that you have the exact error message you should be able to troubleshoot it…
On second thought, you probably just want to format.
You can change the reboot on fatal error setting through a control panel applet, but I can’t remember which one, possibly system or power management. Just in case anyone here is frightened of the Registry. IMHO, If you are not sure if you should afraid of the Reg, then you should be.
I can and do direct customers to third party websites for help, but I am not trained by those companies to support their products, and aside from the referral I cannot hold the customer’s hand while they troubleshoot.
Riiight. Like management listens, even when your suggestions make sense (unless you happily work for a smaller ISP) and later on, sometimes when they implement your suggestions, like you get credit! Buah.
The likely problem is that so many people are in that ISP’s queue right now with the exact same problem. If every agent there decides to take it into their own hands and help out, when these people either misapply the instructions to get rid of the virus or can’t quite understand, guess where they’ll be calling back to?
Exactly. ‘But Agent so-and-so helped me! YOU HAVE TO HELP ME WITH IT TOOOOOOOOOOO!’
Our company was paid a set amount per call for ISP tech support - it would have generated more revenue for our company to do such things, but would have resulted in pretty pissed off clients. The smart thing is to tell them that you can’t take care of it.
It is in the System applet, on the Advanced tab. But if you are already stuck in a boot loop then the only way out is to parallel install and then change the regkey manually, which is the AutoReboot key. I worked 4 years at Microsoft in Las Collinas, TX doing SBS server support. I used to hate having to do this proceedure with customers because it is a huge pain in the ass just to get a blue screen error message that you will most likely have to format to resolve.
But we can fault them for acting like petulant children when they can’t get what they want. There’s no excuse for a customer taking out their frustrations on a service/support worker who is unable to help them.
Okay, so if you work in a Chevy dealership on just Chevy trucks and someone pulls in and demands that you fix their Toyota you’ll be able to do it?
While the person might be able to fix it, they lack the specific knowledge and tools to provide useful assistance as well as wasting his employer’s time taking care of something that is someone else’s problem.
This isn’t even an issue of the blame circle since there’s a clear and specific cause and direction to go in. It’s a virus. An ISP can’t fix a virus. Period. End of story. All the complaining, all the whining, all the begging, all the threatening in the world isn’t going to change that. Speaking to their supervisor isn’t going to change that. Saying you’re going to cancel the account isn’t going to help.
Calling Microsoft may be hell but trying to get it through some people’s skulls that their computer is not a magic box that anyone who has any contact with it can fix anything in it has to be close.
Magayuk, having worked in a support department that got the double whammy of both customers calling up having no clue what we could fix and people in other divisions of the company just transfering people in since they had no clue what they were supposed to fix you have my sympathy.
I just spent several hours last night attempting to fix someone else’s computer who was affected not only by the Blaster worm exploiting the buffer overrun on RPC, but that is also infected by the lovely Spybot worm.
And, lucky as things are, the Spybot worm seems to have a couple of different strains, one of which contains a fake webdav.exe, which is not actually webdav, but disables the ability to run task manager by using Ctrl+Alt+Delete and kills the ability to run regedit.
Of course, there was no anti-virus software on the machine, and due to the RPC problem, a distinct lack of ability to keep the machine running long enough to get some.
Trying to find infected files manually without anti-virus software, no task manager and no regedit (even in safe mode) while giving the instructions over the phone and having the screen contents relayed back from a machine you have no physical access to because it’s in another state is enough to make even a paid support person at Microsoft tear their hair out.
However, lucky me, I’m just the ‘computer geek’ in the family. After three hours of ‘please don’t lose all of my pictures I have saved on here’ it became necessary to reformat. I can completely understand why ISPs will not allow their techs to support other people’s products. That phone call cost me three billable hours last night, and if I weren’t my own boss, I’d have forbidden me from trying to troubleshoot it.
Hmm, anecdotal evidence ahead. I’ve had, oh, 50 calls with this problem today. I didn’t walk more than one or two people through it. Most people can be told what to do and will do it on their own. They might call back if they get stuck, but not usually.
Telling them what needs done is infinitely faster than arguing that you can’t help them. Some problems do need referred to other places, when it’s not your issue. However, on something like this, if you’ve got customers crying and threatening death, then it probably would’ve been faster to tell them what to do and explain you cannot help further than that.
catsix a friend had the exact same problem last night. Took him roughly 3 hours working at the pc before he managed to get it working properly again. Safemode is still able to open Task Manager, even though normal mode cannot with the Spybot worm.
I can imagine the hair pulling that was involved with that call.
It might have been faster, but if the call had been recorded and I walked a customer through fixing it, I might have been fired.
And I did tell them what to do, phone microsoft.
That is why I live by the mantra, “Weekly Backups, weekly backups.” Plus keeping a second HDD on the system, that way if I would ever get that problem, I can scoop what I need and reformat. There were days I wished I was bright enough to develop for MS, it is good to know that it is not computer nirvana there
I can’t stand you’re annoying little smart-ass attitude of how your customers are complete morons for faulting you for something you can’t fix.
Absolutely, it’s not your fault. Absolutely, it’s not your responsibility. Absolutely, it’s not your problem. But you’re still a huge dick.
All it takes is five seconds, probably shorter than it would to argue about supporting it or not, to tell people to go to Norton/Symantec/etc. “It’s not our product, we don’t support it, we cannot be held liable, but this should be able to help you. Have a good day and good luck.”
It’s people like you that made me hate the IT industry.
I read this a few times before I decided that, sadly, it’s probably serious.
Reminded me a little bit of “If you want to make copies, you have to set ‘thip, crinkle, and spoit’ to ‘no,’” which is the way I’ve found things often have to go.
If I fucked around with someone’s computer I could make it worse. I would be held responsible, as would my company. This company has hundreds of agents, not all of them have the same level of skill, and we are expected to stick to our support boundries, not assume we know how to fix something that we have never been trained in.
I don’t know what is so hard to understand, as it was pointed out before, if you have a problem with a Jaguar, you don’t phone Honda.
Undertaking anything in regedit is usually serious and often scares people, but as long as you have good instructions and follow them exactly, there’s very little to worry about.
It’s the people who don’t view regedit with some kind of trepidation who are scary. It’s usually damn near impossible to figure out what changes they made while ‘just cliking around in there.’
SIGH. Here we go again with a whiny customer type that wants someone to do something that not only is not their job but could indeed get them in trouble (all for free mind you), who will snivel and whine if he doesn’t get his way and if the poor Tech relents and helps anyway, won’t even say thank you.
I realize that a lot of folks think that customer service is on the decline, but I am not so sure that customer behavior isn’t worse.
