Computer repair in Alton, Edwardsville and the rest of Madison County Illinois

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Vendor Opinion; Charter Communications

For internet support there is none better than charter.

I cringe when I have to call AT&T. Even for business support. As with most of the outsourced support services, your call will be staticy, heavily accented, and read from a script. Sometimes you get lucky with the business support and end up with a native English speaker. I haven’t figured out the right sequence of buttons or what number you need to dial but it can happen. Although, I kid you not, one time I must have gotten someone in the same time zone as me, because right at 5pm my call mysteriously got disconnected in the middle of it. My call back got a new support person. I had to start the entire process over again and reexplain my problem.

Charter on the other hand; wait time is short, support person is a native English speaker. I’m never disconnected and problems are understood and resolved surprisingly fast. There is also ownership of the problem. The support person will follow up via email to be sure the issue is resolved.

Vendor Opinion; Symantec

After yet another horrible phone support experience, I’ve decided to start blogging about some of my experiences with different vendors and products. These bloggings are only my experience and opinion and other than claiming that I did experience this, there is no basis in fact or documentation. But why would I lie? If my opinion ever changes I will update this post.

One day, I decided to open a case with symantec. After doing an update backup exec started failing with a crypic message that wasn’t very common on the internet. Google having failed me I decided to use this support contract that syamntec charges for yearly. I wen to their website, registered, logged in, and then began the process of opening the case. I got so far as to where the form wanted an email confirmation key. I checked my email. Nothing from symantec. I double checked my email in the account information then went back to the page requesting the key and clicked the “re-send key” button. Nothing. I pushed the back browser button once, not leaving the site, and got the phone number.

The first call was the worst. I ended up in licensing. Who told me I had to call support and that they would transfer me. They transferred me to support who I could tell didn’t really listen to my problem and transferred me back to licensing. Licensing listened, and shot me back to support. Now each time I was transferred the line got more staticy and the accent got more thicker. And wouldn’t you know the last transfer was so horrible that I could not make out a word and was forced to hang up. For a few moments I contemplated picking up day drinking. After a cool off period I called the support number back and got a clean line with a person with a minimal accent. I explained the problem with the website, and this person told me that I simply needed to wait longer for that email. And that I wasn’t in the system yet and I had to wait. Well, it had only been a few hours since I registered on the support site. I resigned to wait a little longer for that key email. But it has been several days now I still have yet to receive the email. This person did confirm that they did have my contact info from 4+ years ago and a few employers ago. But that wasn’t much help. I told this support person that I would wait for the email, but maybe they could help with the original problem. I described the problem with backup exec. The line immediately started getting staticy and I then it all went silent. I said “Hello?” a few times and hung up. Please make note, this is a land line, in my office, and I we don’t ever have issues with our phone.

The original issue is not resolved. I still can’t open an online support ticket, and I obviously cant’ open one with phone support either. I’m noticing a trend in support. They make it real easy to buy their crappy product. And almost impossible to get any help for it.

Syamntec used to be a quality company a few years ago with lots of innovative and functional technologies. I rate their antivirus (SEP) among the worst. Free Microsoft Security Essentials is better and cleaning a system than the high dollar SEP. And don’t even get me talking about Norton. Backup exec does a great job at enterprise backup. But Windows 2008 Backup is faster and way more reliable. Once Microsoft converts that technology to an enterprise backup solution, Backup Exec is going to go away.

dd quick and easy

Here is a link to lots of interesting things to do with dd, but what I want to use was taken from this site.
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Webmin Firewall

install webmin
At first rampart used webmin for its firewall. But I descided to go a different way with it. But since I had to scour the internet looking for webmin firewall/router information, and I already had the documentation for it, I descided to put the documentation here for anyone who might be needing it.
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Rampart Router Firewall Proxy WAP

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Frankintosh

This is frankintosh
It started off as a simple iBook, but went through mad scientist like transformations to become, frankintosh. Muhaha
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Installing 3.2.1 OpenOfficeOrg on Ubuntu 10.4

OpenOfficeOrg 3.2 is what is in the ubuntu repos.And that version is buggy particularly with rtf documents. The fix is in 3.2.1.
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secure file syncronization

Have you ever wanted to keep your Documents directory contents synchronised and consistent across more than one platform? While doing some school work I found myself using my laptop or my desktop and hunting for files.
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VirtualBox – Auto Power On Headless VMs

I like my VMs to run headless. I like my VMs to be powered on. Here is how.
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Continuing the 12 step program from here
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