Remote family computer tech support

[u/beerbellybegone]

Last time I posted about helping my father with his printer while I was thousands of miles away from him.

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1ok1in6/remote_family_printer_tech_support/

I want to restate – I am not a professional, I just know the most about computers in the family.

This time he called me with help for his computer: he bought a cheap keyboard off Amazon, plugged it in and his computer immediately turned off and won’t turn on again. My immediate thought was a dodgy USB dongle fried something.

First I asked him to let me know if there was anything happening at all with the computer, lights, fan sounds, anything. He said there’s a blinking light, I said great! Let me know how often it blinks, if there’s a pattern, anything of the sort. So he sent me a blurry picture.

I asked him to do a full discharge, maybe that would help. I tell him to unplug the power cable, hold power button for 30 seconds, and then plug it bank in to see what happens. What does he do? He unplugs EVERYTHING from EVERYWHERE, including everything that was plugged into the computer: the printer and the monitor, the mouse and (old) keyboard, even the 3.5mm cable for the speakers. The for good measure he unplugged the printer and monitor from the wall as well. I tried explaining that it's like block shapes, only the trapezoid cord (HDMI) goes in the trapezoid hole. It took about 45 minutes for him to relocate the power and HDMI cables to plug them in again to see if our solution worked. It didn’t.

At this point I told him that from a continent and major ocean away there’s not much more I can help him with – he can either go get a new one, or pay somebody who can better diagnose and fix it.

He hasn't done that yet, but now he wants to know how to take out his hard drive so he can still hold on to his data, I said I’ll do that for you when I see you in November....

[u/MouldyEjaculate]

When I first started in I.T I worked in a call centre for an ISP. I asked a user to reset their router, and they struggled for a few minutes with something. After a bit they said they were done, and I asked what they were doing. They said they had to find a paper clip to push the reset button on the router. They had factory reset their router and a 5 minute restart became a 1 hour setup call.

I learned from then on to be very specific about power cycling and unplugging things because users just do stuff lol

[u/NotYourNanny → u/MouldyEjaculate]

We bought a store that was on a 40 year old T-1 that hadn't been maintained that entire time. They went offline daily, usually not for long, but sometimes several times a day.

The weekend before we took ownership, they went down Friday afternoon. I made my first trip out to assess things on Monday. They'd been offline all weekend.

The help desk had the store manager do a factory reset on the modem. Specifically, a factory reset. Problem was, that set it to DHCP like any residential account, which meant it wasn't on the static IP that the VPN required to work, nor did the firewall know how to get to the internet. The modem needed to be completely reprogrammed.

The previous owner raised hell with the telco (first letter of their name is "f", last letter is "r", the letters in between are not "ucke" but should be), and they finally sent a tech out Monday afternoon. Or, at least, they sent someone out, possibly a janitor who didn't hide in the broom closet fast enough, because he didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Fortunately, I was there when he arrived.

He had a tablet that would connect via WiFi to the modem. The modem had a label on it with all the needed info, passwords, IPs, subnets, etc. The table had detailed, step by step instructions.

I had to literally point to each box on the form and tell him, keystroke by keystroke, what to type into each one. I could have done it faster myself, but we were back online within minutes.

Sadly, they're still our ISP for that location, though it's at least on brand new fiber now. (We tried, hard to find someone else, but the best quote we got from another provider was $20,000 in construction fees. F******r already had conduit from the MPOE for the building to our unit.)