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Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

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Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#201

Post by empath75 »

koliber wrote: post #115

Regarding the "is it plugged in?" question. A great anecdote I heard was that the support person on the phone asked if the power plug was clean. The user was confused. The support person told them to unplug it, blow the dust out of the holes, and plug it back in. This fixed the problem! The issue was that the power plug was in the socket, but too loose to connect. Somehow, the support person figured this was the case…

I did that kind of thing all the time when I did phone tech support. If I suspected that a cable wasn't plugged in or was in the wrong port or whatever, I'd have people unplug everything and plug it back in all the time. It fixed a lot of problems, especially with home routers/switches.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#202

Post by empath75 »

redirectleft wrote: post #76
chirau wrote: post #40

I can't believe that some people here think that it is better to move your relatives, who are scared/prone to malware but don't think to restart their computer first, to Linux. What a joke really. Linux is good and all, but come on people, among iOS, MacOS, Windows, Chrome and Linux, it's the least usable and least user friendly.

I'm responsible for my sister, my mother, 6 coworkers and 13 friends running Arch on their hardware, in various personalized configurations that took me maybe 30 minutes each. I can push out updates and flag new software for installation within seconds if they ask me for it and so far, I have not had one serious complaint. Some use Libreoffice for their private stuff, some appstream Office directly into a X window. O…

Computers tend to be easier to use when you have your own personal system administrator available.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#203

Post by milankragujevic »

PostOnce wrote: post #74

I looked at grammable.me to see what it is. Looks like instapainting.com arbitrage, I wonder how long that will be viable.

I can't even load it, it freezes my laptop and forces me to reboot or wait for 2 minutes before Chrome prompts me to kill the tab. (Intel Celeron N3160 + 4GB RAM)

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#204

Post by codemac »

sspiff wrote: post #97
Deestan wrote: post #92

I would add a "I don't know" option. Family members who need tech support from me are generally unable to answer things like: > Is your device up to date? First, they aren't familiar with what is considered a "device". Does it mean the calendar app on the phone (where they see observed problems)? Surely it can't mean their iPad, because that's an iPad and not a "device". The "device" must be the charger thingy. What…

Most commonly, people coming to me for help make a blanket statement like "X is broken", where X could be their phone, computer, an application or website, the Internet as a whole. X is also generally inaccurate. For instance, if the browser icon on my parents computer is moved for whatever reason, they will say that "the Internet is broken". If my mother can't figure out what button to press in a mobile application…

This is like API design though, moving stuff around and changing interfaces is a breaking change if any clients are not updated in lock step with the change.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#205

Post by ashmud »

koliber wrote: post #115

Regarding the "is it plugged in?" question. A great anecdote I heard was that the support person on the phone asked if the power plug was clean. The user was confused. The support person told them to unplug it, blow the dust out of the holes, and plug it back in. This fixed the problem! The issue was that the power plug was in the socket, but too loose to connect. Somehow, the support person figured this was the case…

A few jobs ago (factory automation), we had a story from one of our projects where a device (would have been a PLC or relay panel) was failing. Rather than dust, metal filings had gotten into the case and were shorting out connections. A "quick" cleanup, and the device was working again.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#206

Post by babuskov »

koliber wrote: post #115

Regarding the "is it plugged in?" question. A great anecdote I heard was that the support person on the phone asked if the power plug was clean. The user was confused. The support person told them to unplug it, blow the dust out of the holes, and plug it back in. This fixed the problem! The issue was that the power plug was in the socket, but too loose to connect. Somehow, the support person figured this was the case…

    Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.
                                                    -Clarence Day

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#207

Post by reitanqild »

rtpg wrote: post #107
kriro wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad (>60, not exactly tech saavy) has been using Lubuntu for 2 years now (actually I don't even remember when we installed it might be 4 years :P). For many parents who only surf the web and do some non power user office (he uses Libre Office now) and check their mail it's the perfect solution. For his use case it's more user friendly than the Windows install because of the lack of constant update requests and ant…

yeah, people who know basically nothing aren't much of an issue, because they have no habits The harder people to move over are ones who have ingrained certain things like "I need WinRAR to open this kind of file", and not being able to independently research for alternatives. People with mid-level computer experience, but not much experience in new environments suffer a lot on these transitions.

I gave said the same:

Linux is for grandmothers, old electricians ... and seasoned sysadmins and programmers like me.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#208

Post by reitanqild »

keithpeter wrote: post #103
dilliwal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I installed Ubuntu on my Dads laptop, and believe me, he had no troubles understanding and using it. Also never heard any complains from him about virus or system slowing down. Sooo good for me. :D

https://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-un... Canonical actually spent money on user interface testing. I can find some activity for Gnome shell but I'm having problems digging up any solid testing for KDE.

Usability people once came up with a brilliant observation about "spatial" and someone used that to argue that everytime you clicked on a folder in Gnome it should open in a new window.

Of course this made desktop a mess.

Many usability people also claim that it is good to have the menus attached to the top of the screen instead of attached to the window it affects.

Software recommended by usability people often have menus hidden away behind "gear" or "hamburger" icons.

I am not a usability expert but often I feel software is worse off after the ux people have had a say.

In particular it seems for many of them the goal is to mimic Mac OS X.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#209

Post by kpgraham »

arethuza wrote: post #175
koliber wrote: post #115

Regarding the "is it plugged in?" question. A great anecdote I heard was that the support person on the phone asked if the power plug was clean. The user was confused. The support person told them to unplug it, blow the dust out of the holes, and plug it back in. This fixed the problem! The issue was that the power plug was in the socket, but too loose to connect. Somehow, the support person figured this was the case…

Many years ago in my first job (1988) I was diagnosing a Unix printing problem on a machine remotely (dialed in via modems). There was an IBM engineer on site who insisted it was a software problem - I was on the phone to him and he was getting rather annoyed with me and I asked the inevitable "Is it actually plugged into the power?" which got him very angry that I would have the cheek to suggest that he hadn't check…

In 1984 I was a PC instructor at a large paper company and I was called up to the 23rd floor to fix a senior vice president's PC. He stood there while I worked on it. It would not power up. I looked around the back of the desk and the PC was unplugged. I then carefully took off the case cover and removed all the cards and cleaned the contacts and put them back in. I assembled the PC, plugged it in and it booted. I did not want to tell a senior VP that his PC wasn't working because he didn't check to see if it was plugged in.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#210

Post by mordechai9000 »

koliber wrote: post #115

Regarding the "is it plugged in?" question. A great anecdote I heard was that the support person on the phone asked if the power plug was clean. The user was confused. The support person told them to unplug it, blow the dust out of the holes, and plug it back in. This fixed the problem! The issue was that the power plug was in the socket, but too loose to connect. Somehow, the support person figured this was the case…

When I did Internet support at an ISP years ago, I would sometimes use a similar strategy and ask people to reverse the Ethernet cable.

If you ask directly, people will often just instantly tell you the cable is good, without even touching it.

Customers would sometimes question this, but I don't recall anyone refusing after I explained the reasoning.

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