Re: Guidelines please

> One famous sentence in a supportdesk is, and you read it a lot here
> to:"Works fine at my computer".
> This is not very helpful.

That's a phrase I also use too often with the people using my
application at the office. However, many times when I investigate their
complaint further, I find a problem but not what I expected, because the
user did not clearly explain the problem. This is to be expected; the
ability of the average user to properly describe a problem in precise
terms is not very good.

But I too have given some poor tech support people fits. I recently had
a problem with a commercial product, a new video capture board that I
bought to replace an old one I was dissatisfied with. First, I was
getting error messages on startup which indicated some weird licensing
problem. After sending many complaint message to tech support and
getting suggestions that did no good at all, I finally decided to
uninstall the old video board's software (yeah, I know, I should have
done that first). That helped somewhat. The startup error messages
disappeared. However, I found another problem: when I tried to record
captured video on the 'VCR', I got another cryptic error message, which
I dutifully reported to their tech support. Shortly after that, the
capture board stopped working altogether. In desperation, I uninstalled
all of the new capture board software and reinstalled it again. Voila,
after that, everything worked fine. Just shoot me. In the meantime, I
had berated some poor technician in India day and night, who was
probably thinking "It works on my machine".

The point I am trying to make, by the above example, is that a lot of
problems with software are due to the horrendous design of the O/S
WHOSE-NAME-SHALL-NOT-BE-MENTIONED and its never-ending DLL Hell. If
others are like me, they have countless applications installed over many
years and have made many updates to the O/S. I would guess that many
(not all, of course) of the software problems people complain about are
due to the conflicts which can arise with the morass of .DLL's and
drivers people have on their systems. This might explain, at least
partially, why some people think D2005 runs just fine and others think
the same product is brain-dead. Unfortunately, those kinds of problems
are not Borland's fault. Maybe they should insist that D2005 should be
installed on a pristine machine.

Mark J. Wallin, Ph.D.
.

Relevant Pages

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