Comment on Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall feature is coming back in October
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks agoExactly. And that’s not helpful for your average Windows user. If your average Windows user calls tech support, they’ll get a simple answer. If they instead walk into a tech support room, they’ll get multiple answers, with the techs trying to one-up each other because that’s how they work.
So if you’re a novice in an area, talk one-on-one, don’t ask a crowd.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
They’ll get a simple answer alright. In fact, they’ll be lucky if they get any answer at all that is not reboot, retry, reinstall or some other cargo cult nonsense from some on-paper “MCSA” in a third world country.
And sorry for going on a rant here, but Windows tech support forums are truly the shit tier of all tech support forums, because very few people actually have the skill to properly diagnose problems in Windows when something outside of the realm of expected behavior occurs. It’s all learned behaviorisms instead of understanding: reinstall your drivers! defrag your hard drive! run ipconfig /renew! clean your cache folder! delete your cookies! Never: “look in the system eventlog for an error event coming from this source, and tell me what the error code says”
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
And 90% of the time, that’ll solve the problem.
The other 10% of the time, hopefully you have a decent IT dept at your work or school. I worked at one, and we occasionally had a weird one where we needed to actually check the event logs and figure out what was going on (usually it’s faulty HW).
If I was bored, I’d even look at people’s personal equipment, provided they asked nicely and they were okay with my upfront “no guarantees” spiel. At that point, I had already switched to Linux 100% on my personal devices (and my work machine was Linux w/ Windows in a VM), though my job was Windows tech support. However, when anyone came in, there would always be a host of “did you try X?” and whatnot, where X is some relatively obscure cli-only tool (e.g. flushing the DNS cache) or some BIOS setting. Nerds love a puzzle, and a visitor bringing a problem is a much more exciting puzzle than whatever is in the ticket queue, and they want to impress the guest with their knowledge (but more often than not, the guest just ignores everything they say).
That lone person will give you a simple answer. It may not be the best answer, but it’ll probably solve the problem, though it may cost you more (e.g. you may need to buy some new hardware or spend time reinstalling).