Tech Support

Obtaining assistance from IT technical support staff is a common occurrence that almost all of us have experienced in our lives. Most of my experiences with IT support have been unpleasant. In university, whenever I had any computer issues, the University of Waterloo (Math Faculty Computing Facility) MFCF technical support was not very helpful. Quite often, the person whom I end up talking to for help in resolving my residential Internet problems is in his first week on the job.

I am often contacted by family members whenever there are computer issues in my house. Here are the most popular problems I hear:

• The computer does not start, fix it.
• The printer is not printing, fix it.
• The Internet is not working, fix it.

The volume of problems are increasing since my dad started to use the computer more. His computer is always infested with spyware. I think he ends up clicking on those pop-ups asking you to download software that will make your computer go faster, which usually end up installing the software and spyware. I am asked to fix so many problems that I decided to devise the following system when a problem occurs:

Contact 1^st-level technical support => My little sister.
If not solved then contact 2^nd-level technical support => My little brother.
If it still cannot be solved, the problem escalates to me and I undertake the responsibility of trying to fix and explain the problem (not fun ): ).

Most of the problems I have seen on computers is the infestation of spyware, which is installed from free software downloaded off the Internet. Although you can download spyware removal software, it is easier to avoid downloading software containing spyware.

A Web site containing links to free software without spyware cane be found here.

Here is a list of my favorite free software to install:

• Browser: Mozilla Firefox
• FTP Client: FileZilla
• Media player: Winamp
• Graphics software: Paint .NET
• Word processor: Open Office

My advice to people downloading free software is a common phrase I heard growing up and is also applicable to this situation, which is Stay Alert, Stay Safe!