How to Get Free or Cheap Tech Support - caldwellhanceseles

It's counterfeit enough that you have to spend your Sunday with the phone wedged between your shoulder and ear, as you root through your calculator's control settings or get into a mess of serpentine cables behind your home entertainment system, because something isn't temporary. Having to earnings for service rightful makes matters worse.

In that regard, things are looking up. More and Thomas More companies, including Microsoft and Crutchfield, now offer free or nickel-and-dime help to resolve many of your gadget dilemmas. The chart below identifies some of the features offered by three relinquish or inexpensive tech-help services: Costco Concierge Services, Crutchfield, and Microsoft Answer Desk.

Microsoft Answer Desk

In early December 2011, Microsoft quiet launched Answer Desk, an online tech support center that provides free help to customers dealings with basic Microsoft software malfunctions, and offers in-depth help for a fee. The party's move may ingest come in response to Malus pumila, which offers free in-depot support for basic problems, and priority support for a yearly fee.

If you're having a problem with Excel, or if your version of Windows isn't behaving every bit IT should, Microsoft has technicians standing by to help you out at no explosive charge. Respond Desk staff can assistance you over the phone or via a custom Web chat service. Support is available around the clock to anyone with a Hotmail account, which is footloose and easy to create.

Resolve Desk's free service of process is available only for dealing with cordate problems involving a Windows product. For more-complex issues, you'll have to pull out your charge card.

In a series of informal trials, I asked for advice connected buying a Windows call up, setting awake Entourage (the Apple-only Microsoft Office electronic mail and calendar guest), and finding some toolbars that had gone Absent in my adaptation of Word.

The technician I spoke to about Entourage seemed happy to dump me with a link to a relevant FAQ page, but my another two supporting agents were really patient and helpful.

Microsoft aims to spend a penny the gross experience seem personal. For each one of its technicians has a profile visualize, a personal page that can be bookmarked, and a Yelping-like star paygrad. Some even speak multiple languages. If you find a technician who is particularly assistive, you can search for and request that person in the future, by name OR by ID count.

Answer Desk's premium services, ranging in price from $49 to $99, buy you anywhere from one hour to two hours of "one-on-one" prison term with a technical school. The rep will service you optimise your PC's performance, beginning stunned and eliminate viruses, or get more out of your Windows products. If you and the tech can't trope out a particular problem via chat or over the telephone set, Answer Desk staff can access your data processor remotely.

These services are, in part, an response to Apple's One to Ace service, which makes various technical support and learning tools available to customers online and in Apple stores for $99 a year.

Crutchfield

Non only does this home and auto electronics depot offer its customers free lifetime branch of knowledge support, just IT sells relatively inexpensive technical school-support packages to people who have purchased stereos, TVs, or MP3 players elsewhere.

Crutchfield does non deal or offer technical school support for background PCs, laptops, or operating systems. But reported to Shawn Lyons, tech support director for the company, its technicians are prepared to aid customers with just roughly any other physics twist, including car stereos, home entertainment systems, radio networks, and iPods. "If I can observe a hand-operated for it online someplace, then odds are we derriere help you," Lyons says.

Like Microsoft's Answer Desk, Crutchfield defend is available 24/7. Different that overhaul's help, however, Crutchfield's is available only by phone.

The company's two support packages–90-Clarence Shepard Day Jr. ($30) and lifetime ($100)–are sold on a per-product basis. So, assistance you buy for your TV isn't transferrable to a router on the fritz. If you're disbelieving about whether Crutchfield bottom help you with a given trouble, you power still neediness to give them a try at the $30 unwavering. According to Lyons, if a tech is unable to provide adequate support, you'll receive a full refund.

Lyons says that all of the fellowship's techs consume an eight-calendar week, hands-on training course. And Crutchfield encourages its techs to formulate specialties. That way, if a customer calls with a question that one tech can't answer, someone else on tariff probably rear.

Father't count on these guys to help you stylish any of your electronics, though. Crutchfield's techs are there to help with setup, configuration, and troubleshooting only.

Costco Concierge Sevices

The warehouse retailer offers technical support for a beamy range of electronics products purchased from Costco either online or at one of its brick-and-mortar locations.

Costco's Concierge Services technical support can help guide customers through frame-up, product use, and troubleshooting questions regarding TVs, computers, tablets, projectors, cameras, MP3 players, national theater systems, printers, routers–and level pressure washers.

Care Crutchfield's, Costco's technical school livelihood is in stock only over the call; but dissimilar both Answer Desk and Crutchfield, representatives are not available round the clock. Costco's tech support runs regular from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. Eastern Time.

PCWorld How-To's

Naturally, consumers with an independent stripe can always attempt Google, YouTube, online forums, and the How-To section of PCWorld.com, where you'll find a depository library of tips and tricks that we've compiled to help you navigate the digital world.

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