I thought this might be a good place for this question since there
are so many professionals -- as in working techs -- on this list. I
have worked in tech support for a few years and have recently started
taking on my own clients for Windows support and troubleshooting.

Every once in awhile, I get a client who complains of general
instability -- Applications crash. PC BSODs, GPFs, etc.

My previous tech support experience has been working hand-in-hand
with developers. So, I would, first, reproduce the problem, second,
determine the steps to produce a hard failure, and, three, take it to
development for logging and a possible patch.

It seems to me, however, that my customers don't care for this
approach. (Aside from the "take it to development" part, which may or
may not be available, as we all know.) They want it all to be better
as soon as possible and they don't so much want to know _why_
something doesn't work.

I understand their reluctance; they're paying me by the hour. It
could be substantially more expensive for me to eliminate every
problem one-by-one. But I cringe at the Scorched PC policy, as
someone at Gateway Tech Support put it to me. "F-Disk, Format,
Reinstall. Doo-Dah. Doo-Dah." For one thing, it may not eliminate the
problem. For another thing, we won't know what caused the problem in
the first place. (Learning from history and all that.)

Plus, in all of this there I have the desire to create something
affordable _and_ practical for the customer.

I'm wondering how you guys deal with this? Do you apply some
policy-driven set of fixes then, if those don't work, go into
seek-and-destory-errors mode? Do you install in-place if the O.S.
supports it? Do you backup files, format, and reinstall? Or, do you
convince the customer to pay you to actually troubleshoot?

Curious...

m
--

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml