Manufacturer-Based Online Support

Some of the best manufacturer sites look rather boring when you first open them in your browser. Some of the flashiest sites actually have the least to offer, perhaps because they spent their budget on fancy web effects rather than on smart people to write useful help.

But don’t let first appearances form your judgment when you visit manufacturer web sites looking for technical support. Dig beneath the surface and be prepared to spend time looking around to see what may be available.

The exact names of the features may vary from site to site, but most manufacturer sites offer the following:

  • Online product registration

  • Product information and manuals

  • Drivers and downloads

  • Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

  • Support options, including

    • Message boards or newsgroups

    • Live chat

    • E-mail to a technical-support representative

    • Online analysis

    • Other support options

Besides these, most sites contain a Search option that allows you to search the site based on a word, phrase, or even a product name or model number.

Note 

While many users think immediately of hardware when considering manufacturer sites, most major products—from Windows (www.microsoft.com/windows) to specialty software—have sites offering some level of help.

Online Product Registration

Online product registration offers you a slight advantage over filling out, stamping, and returning those product registration postcards included with most electronics and computer hardware. Many manufacturers allow you to register your product online during your first visit.

A few companies require you to register a purchased product before you get full access to the rest of their web site. The overwhelming majority, however, make their sites public, so you don’t have to show proof of purchase to use them.

Product Information and Manuals

For most hardware and software products, the days of fat manuals with detailed diagrams and useful suggestions have long passed. Extensive product documentation costs money to develop, print, and ship, so this was an early casualty in the war to make PCs cheaper. To be fair, most companies realized that many users don’t bother to read the manuals.

Fear not, however. Some of those same companies have realized that it’s far less expensive to publish their manuals and product specifications online at their web sites, viewable using something like Adobe Acrobat Reader, software that’s often installed already on new PCs or can be easily downloaded. You’ll often find more extensive information in the online manual than you will with the product itself. So even if you get a manual with your product, check the online version, which may have been updated since yours was printed. Figure 15.1 contains one of Western Digital’s online manuals.

click to expand
Figure 15.1: Western Digital makes it easy to check drive installation manuals online.

Tip 

Obviously, the manufacturer’s site is the best place to check if you’ve lost the manual you received with the product.

Drivers and Downloads

Recall that Chapter 2, “How Your Hardware, Operating System, and Applications Work Together,” explained that PC hardware may sit on a shelf for months or longer before you bring it home, which can present a problem when the driver(s) packed with that device become seriously outdated.

The manufacturer’s web site is an ideal place to download the most recent driver version. And sometimes you can also find updated companion software there for download as well. Figure 15.2 shows the downloads available at Creative Labs’ technical support site.

click to expand
Figure 15.2: Use the Download Drivers section on sites like this to find drivers and software.

Before downloading a file from a web site, take these precautions:

  • Make sure what you download and install is for your exact product and is compatible with your version of Windows.

  • Read any instructions or notes posted on the site regarding what you download.

  • Carefully follow the instructions for installing it.

When the product is software, many manufacturer sites let you, as a registered owner of the product (or someone who wants to try it out), download a full working copy or a trial demo of the most recent version of that software. You can also get patches and add-ons, depending on the site, the product, and the manufacturer.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Found on technical sites all over the Internet and on manufacturer sites, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) lists are just what you might guess: a list of the questions asked most often about a particular subject. Most sites offer many FAQs, covering a wide variety of issues on the same topic.

The quality of FAQs varies, but they can be an excellent resource for problems you’re currently having and problems other users may be having with a particular product or feature that you should be aware of. Sometimes it’s easy to see that the questions being answered in the FAQs are ones that could have been answered from reading the product documentation. Other questions may alert you to incompatibilities between this product and others, to early warning signs of failure, or to limitations of the product itself.

Other Support Options

You may run into other features at manufacturers’ web sites, including message boards or newsgroups, chat, an e-mail link to customer support, and online analysis.

Message Boards or Newsgroups

A message board is often likened to an electronic bulletin board, where questions, comments, and announcements are posted as individual messages in a special area of a web site. As these messages generate new comments and questions (in the form of replies), these individual messages become tied together into a thread, a progressive text conversation. Major threads are grouped into folders to organize what is often a very busy manufacturer message base.

There are message boards everywhere:

  • manufacturer web sites

  • online services like America Online and MSN

  • government web sites

  • newspaper and magazine sites

  • simple “home” sites

On a manufacturer’s site, your posts are apt to be answered by customer service representatives for that company. On non-manufacturer sites, a mix of different people (knowledgeable and not) respond to user questions.

Later in this chapter, in the section “Asking for Help in the Expert Zone,” you’ll see the details of one message board.

Understand that different sites use many different types of message board software, so how you use them may change from site to site. Always look for a Help or Message Board Tutorial link in a message board area for instructions. Most boards have certain rules that are clearly posted, for example, no profanity or no advertising.

Newsgroups are also collections of messages, much like message boards. However, unlike message boards that are based on web sites, newsgroups follow a specific non-web format for message exchange. This means you need a newsreader rather than a web browser to read newsgroups (Outlook Express has a newsreader, for example). You need to configure your newsreader to look at a particular newsgroup server to send and receive messages for that newsgroup.

However, newsgroups aren’t the most common way people share messages today; message boards dominate. Those web sites that offer newsgroups tend to offer them in a web-based format.

Live Chat

You often see live chats on computer shopping sites, where you can talk with a customer representative about a purchase you’re considering. But several manufacturers and technical support web sites offer a chat room feature as well.

A chat room, if you’ve never been in one, is simply a program that opens up a direct or indirect connection between two or more persons who can then type back and forth in the same window. This is faster than exchanging e-mail or using a network messaging program like ICQ or Windows Messenger.

E-mail to Support Representative

Most manufacturer web sites allow you to e-mail a question directly to support staff. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the fastest option to use for help. Support staff answer e-mail messages around their other duties, so it can takes days or weeks to get a response.

If you need a faster answer, try posting to appropriate message boards in the hope that other users will jump in and help you within a matter of hours (most respond within 48 hours). However, if you need an immediate answer, call the manufacturer’s technical support phone line.

Online Analysis

A few manufacturers and technical sites offer a feature that can test certain problems on your PC, including your Internet connection, modem speed, hard drive speed, or video capability. This analysis evaluates how well their product (or someone else’s product that you’re considering replacing with their product) performs.

This analysis can be similar to the benchmark tests I told you about in Chapter 12, “PC Performance: Diagnosing, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting Problems.”

Other Support Options

Finally, most manufacturers’ sites offer a variety of ways to contact the company for more assistance, including fax numbers, other contact e-mail addresses, or special phone numbers for serious problems and/or product returns.

Finding Your Manufacturer’s Technical Support Site

Since it’s in a company’s best interest to be easy to find, always try the most obvious domain name. For example, you can find Dell Computer at www.dell.com and IBM at www.ibm.com. If your manufacturer doesn’t make it easy, use a web search engine such as Google (www.google.com) and search on words you think will identify it, such as the product name and/or the company name. Table 15.1 provides a list of some major computer manufacturers and their web sites.

Table 15.1: Major Computer Manufacturers’ Web Sites

Manufacturer

URL

3Com

www.3com.com

Advanced Micro Devices

www.amd.com

ATI Technologies

www.atitech.com

Compaq

www.compaq.com

Creative Labs

www.creativelabs.com

Dell

www.dell.com

eMachines

www.eMachines.com

Epson

www.epson.com

Gateway

www.gateway.com

Hewlett-Packard

www.hp.com

IBM

www.ibm.com

Intel

www.intel.com

Logitech

www.logitech.com

Quantum

www.quantum.com

U.S. Robotics

www.usr.com

Western Digital

www.wdc.com



PC Disaster and Recovery
PC Disaster and Recovery
ISBN: 078214182X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 140
Authors: Kate J. Chase

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