NEED AN ANSWER? ASK A FORUM.

I'm happy. Very happy. Over the past weekend, an on-going problem I've been having with the old HP Pavilion 5700 (that I refuse to part with, thank you very much) finally got resolved. It didn't get resolved by HP tech support who were, frankly, useless. It didn't get resolved by the IT support group used by the company I work for, and it didn't get resolved by following HP's on-line troubleshooting tools. It got resolved by two guys on an internet forum.

"evil_bob" and "Camaro Guy". gave me the answer to my problem within a half-hour of my asking the question on an online forum dedicated to solving PC-related problems. It turned out to be a CD-ROM driver issue that, even though I know nothing about "drivers" took no longer than ten minutes to fix myself, with the help of their step-by-step instructions. There was an additional five minutes spent while they reassured me that the driver would, indeed, re-install itself on start-up, but I won't include that in the repair time. After thanking the forum members in a style of English that must have made them instantly aware I was old enough to be their Mother, I pressed my luck and asked how to change a DVD player to "multi-region", meaning it can play DVD's manufactured in other countries. This time it was "teenychinagal" who responded with a link to her own amateur video tutorial on how precisely to resolve that issue. I spent five minutes watching the video, and three minutes to make a simple change to some hardware settings, and the job was done. Total time spent to resolve both issues? About two hours from diagnoses to "fix". Total cost? $0.00. Total respect from me? Absolute.

While I'm thrilled with the outcome it's also a bit of an embarrassment for me because I have a tendency to bang on about how the internet has depersonalized society. In fact (and I am not making this up) the article I started this week had to do with the role of the internet in effectively "killing" customer service, but it simply isn't true. The problem is me, because I've clearly been visiting the wrong sites. Where the combined wisdom of HP and several highly-trained professionals failed, people who I will never know, and who have absolutely nothing to gain but the fact they were able to help, succeeded.

Come to think of it though, maybe my first column idea was only half wrong; while the internet hasn't killed customer service it's brought to the fore that customer service, real customer service has been dying a slow death for some time. That would certainly explain the existence of on-line help forums in the first place. I would like to think that the people who helped me became so exasperated with the same "technical support" I received that they got together one day and said, "sod all, we can do better than this and we can use goofy screen names at the same time". They certainly did do better than traditional customer service because forums don't just give you an answer, you can get an explanation as well and knowing what causes things to go wrong is the best way to avoid and solve a problem in the future. I would never get a proper explanation from an IT professional, after all, why would they give that information away free of charge? And, I most definitely wouldn't get an explanation from HP tech support because, well, they probably don't have an explanation.

The lesson learned here is that, for a frustrating, unpleasant experience with an unsatisfactory outcome, try traditional customer service. For real knowledge and first-hand experience from people with no agenda, ask your question on a forum. I'm going to start looking for a Subaru forum next week. I'm having trouble with windshield wiper noises in the Outback, and I know there's a Subaru owner somewhere in cyberspace who can tell me best how to fix it.