When you can’t figure something out by
guessing, usually your next thought is to call someone on the phone.
Whether that strategy works depends on whom you call. Many of the
larger companies charge for telephone support, and it can be quite
expensive, especially if you don’t know all the terminology. When you
don’t know the terminology, it’s hard to ask the question and even
harder to understand the answer.
You have some online alternatives to using the
phone that enable you to get help from another person without spending
a fortune. Clicking the Contact Support link in Help And Support shows
these alternatives (see Figure 6). Click the link in each section to get more information about the selected option.
Remote Assistance
Remote Assistance is a technology that
allows another person to see what’s on your computer screen and operate
your computer with his or her mouse and keyboard. The idea here is to
turn control of your computer over to a trusted expert to resolve your
problem.
We’re not aware of any companies that will
connect to and fix your computer for free, but your company may have an
internal support group that provides that service. For home computers,
your trusted expert will likely be a knowledgeable friend or family
member.
Microsoft Answers website
The Microsoft Answers website is a community site in which other users hang out, ask questions, and answer questions in various forums
(topic areas). Nobody gets paid to work on the community site. It’s all
done on a volunteer basis so there’s no charge to access the site.
The Microsoft Answers site doesn’t provide
instant gratification. No one is standing by waiting for your questions
and ready to answer on the spot. It’s more like a newsgroup: People
post messages, and other people reply at their convenience. This is
another option that you can add to your list of resources when you’re
looking for information.
The easiest way to get to the Microsoft Answers site is to open Internet Explorer and navigate to http://answers.microsoft.com.
To get to the site from Windows, first make sure that your computer is
online. Then, open Windows Help And Support as explained previously and
click the Microsoft Answers Website link. Your web browser opens to the
home page for the Windows forums. We can’t say exactly how it will look
because it’s a web page, and web pages change all the time. But you
should see a Search box and some basic instructions, as shown in Figure 7.
It’s important to understand that when you type
something in the Search box and click Search (with the Find Answers
options selected), what you get is a list of all the previous newsgroup
posts that contain the word or phrase for which you searched, similar
to the example in Figure 8
The idea is to scroll through all the messages to
see whether one looks as though it might help. Then click its message
header (the text in bold) to expand the thread. A thread
consists of the original message and all the replies to that message.
To read any message in the thread, click its header in the left pane.
The message text appears in the right pane.
Tip
The Microsoft Answers site returns two
types of results. The Results From Answers tab lists the search results
from forum postings that match your query. The Results From Microsoft
Support tab lists search results from Microsoft Support articles and
resources that match your search query. So, if you don’t see what
you’re looking for in the Results from Answers tab, click the Results
From Microsoft Support tab to see if the answer to your question is
there.
To post your own question to a group, you need to
set up an account. Don’t worry; you don’t have to give up any personal
information. Nor will there ever be a charge. You need to set up the
account only once, not every time you use the newsgroups.
To post a question start by clicking Ask A
Question. If you haven’t set up an account yet, you’ll be given the
opportunity to do so on the next page that opens. Otherwise, if you
already have set up an account, you can sign in by entering your
username and password. After you do so, you’ll be able to create a new
post, as shown in Figure 9.
Microsoft customer support
Clicking the Contact Support link in
Windows Help And Support takes you to a web page that provides still
more support options. There, you’ll find a ton of links to different
kinds of support for different kinds of questions. Take a look at all
your options and decide what’s best for you.
