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Although Chapter 18, “Knowing When to Call Professionals,” talks about this subject in more detail, let me offer a suggestion before you look for online help, especially if you’re planning to use newsgroups or the technical help chat rooms at manufacturer web sites and online services. This suggestion also works well before making calls to customer service.
Prepare a brief statement (2–5 paragraphs is usually best) in which you talk about
What kind of system you have
What operating system and version you use
The symptoms you’re experiencing (including the exact wording of any error messages or on-screen warnings)
What you may have done (added, changed, or removed) since the last time everything worked properly
What else you’ve already tried and what results you got from those attempts
Any other relevant information such as previous problems of a similar nature
Being prepared will make it easier to provide the facts to those assisting you, while making it less likely you’ll forget something important. And if type up your problem in a program like Notepad, then you can simply cut and paste the information into a post that you leave at several different help sites.
Here’s an example of a well-detailed posting to a message board asking for help:
Hi and hope you can help.
My Celeron 1.4GHz running Windows 98 has three drives installed, including two hard drives: a 60GB IBM and a 20GB Seagate.
Now the 60GB drive is seen and works fine and is the larger drive. However, the smaller drive is only seen as being 8GB in size rather than the 20GB it actually has.
Both drives are FAT32 and if my BIOS can see the first, larger drive correctly (and it does), I don’t understand why it’s got the other drive wrong.
One other thing: the 20GB Seagate came out of a PC that was totaled in a flood. The drive was checked by a technician after the disaster and checked out fine. Here, it’s detected and works fine except for the size issue.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
When asking for help in chat rooms or posting online in message boards and newsgroups, there is some information you should never give out, especially in public areas. This includes
Your home telephone number
Unique identifying information such as your name, your home address, and never your Social Security number
Your product serial number
Your banking/credit card number
First, you may not know exactly who the person is on the other end of the line (online or telephone). Second, there are companies that exist just to extract private information from online postings to sell to marketers and other businesses.
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