Posts Tagged tech support
Tech Support the easy way
Last year I posted about my mother and how I decided for her new computer that she should buy a Mac Mini. This was mainly a selfish decision on my part since it would allow me to use iChat to share her screen whenever she has a problem she wants me to look at. Such was the case on Saturday night when she called me and wanted to know how to do a few basic things.
As is my wont, I was complaining to a friend of mine about being tech support for a family member when he shared his tale of family tech support from Saturday. It seems that his father bought an Acer computer and was having some problems. My friend was on the phone with him and was trying to help him download the updated driver and whatnot. As you can imagine, helping a family member (a non computer savvy one at that) to download and install new drivers is not for the faint of heart. In the end it turned out that it wasn’t a driver issue at all.
This is why I decided that my mother get a MacMini instead of a Windows box. I’d much rather be dealing with questions of how to print or email something instead of having to lead her through downloading the latest drivers only to find that they aren’t needed.
Family (Tech) Support
Most of us who like technology have been in this position one time or another, giving out technical support for family members. Usually it would wind up like the beginning of this scenario.
Color me surprised when my mother told me that she ordered DSL for her home and she wanted me to get her computer (circa 2001) hooked up to the DSL modem. That was an experience that I wasn’t looking forward to in any way shape or form. Then an idea came to me, if I was going to have to support her computer, why not give her a computer that would be easy to support. And, if I needed to see what was on her monitor it would be easy to do so? It sounded like a good idea to me and so I bought my mother a MacMini.
Sunday I went over to her house and set up the MacMini. The first thing I did (after I turned it on) was set up my mom with an iChat account via AIM and signed her into iChat and that was all I needed to get the screen sharing done. After that I installed NeoOffice so she could write papers and other word processing goodness. She was already used to OpenOffice from her old job so it is a seamless transition. I then took care of all the other stuff like setting up her printer and showing her how to use Safari as her web browser.
The only thing that I wasn’t able to set up (for technical reasons) was her email account on the benedictfamily.org domain and set up Mail.app. I set the account up last night and then I was able to set up her email account using iChat and the screen sharing ability that is baked into the application. Then later in the day, she called and I was able to walk her through another question she had.
I’m glad I made the right decision.
