Does anyone know of an "ombudsman" type of person or site where I could upload my problems with Avast.
They sold me a policy to "fix anything wrong on computer". Not only do their techs not know their *** from their elbow, but their hours and hours of unsuccessful efforts have ****ed up my computer so badly I have lost valuable programs and documents.
They do not answer Certified Mail and emails, so it looks like they are blowing me off. Maybe if some entity more powerful than Consumer Sucker leans on them?
I understand such "ombudsman" or whatever you call them, do exist, so maybe you resourceful people can direct me.
Not a policy, a package or a program. How did this initial contact with Avast take place? Ordinarily, you just download their free product. If you want to upgrade to the paid version, you just go to their website and make the purchase online. I ask because I'm wondering if you dealt with the third party company that does Avast's phone support for them, and not Avast itself.
Efforts at what? Your lacks enough detail to make sense.
have ****ed up my computer so
Avast's own user support forums strongly discourage people from contacting Avast's third-party phone support, because their quality of service is so very poor. Instead, users are encouraged to seek assistance directly from Avast and from other users via Avast's online support forums.
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Any time you decide to install a piece of software, first look for and bookmark the company's website, and also the support forums for the product. Then, if you have questions or issues, you'll be able to easily find where to get help.
See the Avast forum link. There are many threads where people post issues and have Avast support directly address them.
I don't know anything about Avast specifically or what this "policy" is supposed to cover. But I would bet that if it's really a phone support contract, that somewhere in there they say that they can't guarantee to be able to fix everything and anything. There are some problems that can't be figured out, identified, fixed, without essentially starting over by re-installing the OS or "as shipped" image. For example, a friend of mine has an issue right now where about every 5 or 10 mins, his PC momentarily stops accepting input from the keyboard and just sits there for 20 or 30 secs.
There is only so much anyone can do to try to resolve something like that. You can try to go back to previous restore points, remove any recently installed programs, etc. But that may not resolve it. Over years, more and more software gets added, updated, removed, etc and eventually it's not unusual for there to be some kind of issue that's impossible to identify. To expect them to be able to fix anything is like expecting a doctor to be able to cure any illness. On top of that, the tech support may not be that good anyway. They may be more suited to helping grandma find control panel.
The solution is to make sure you know where all your user files, photos, etc are. They should be regularly backed up somewhere other than the system hard drive. Make sure you have them backed up, make note of the apps you have installed, then restore the PC to it's "as shipped" image. I think the vast majority of PCs shipped today have the image right on the hard drive, in a separate partition. They also bug you for a long time when the PC is new to make a set of DVDs from that image so that the PC can be restored from those, if the HD fails. Doing it from the image is faster and easier, if the drive is still working. The help files on the PC or googling a bit should reveal the procedure. Essentially it's pushing a key on bootup to bring up the restore menu. Having done that, then the PC will need to install all the updates that have come out over the years. The whole process can take a couple of hours, but when it's done, you have a clean PC. And people are usually shocked at how fast the PC runs, because a lot of crap is gone. Then you have to copy back your saved user files.
As others have said, you don't provide any information about exactly what you signed up for, nor about what was wrong with your computer in the first place. Many things are not fixable by reomte tech support. The only links I see online are for a free "PC repair" tool. Those kinds of tools are generally unnecessary at best. There are hundreds available. Some people swear by many of them, like the popular CCleaner, but if you occasionally clear your Recycle Bin and delete TEMP files, there's nothing else of value that those programs do. So-called Registry cleaners are risky programs that also do nothing worthwhile. Again, some people swear by them but the facts just don't support that view. A Registry cleaner removes maybe 100 or 200 outdated Registry settings that are doing no harm. When Internet Explorer starts up it typically makes about 5,000 calls to the Registry in about 1 second. (You can confirm that with tools from sysinternals.com.) The Registry is a database. Removing perhaps .1% of the values in a database that can handle thousands of accesses per second is clearly not going to have any affect on performance.
But that kind of software ia appealing because it makes people feel like they're treating their PC well -- like the satisfaction of waxing one's car.
If you really need tech support I'd suggest that you ask around to friends and find someone local. Big companies that do tech support (Staples, for instance) generally just have unskilled workers who are trained to run scripts and software, like anit-virus. Most of what they do you can do yourself.
"Higgs Boson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com... | Does anyone know of an "ombudsman" type of person or site where I could upload my problems with Avast. | | They sold me a policy to "fix anything wrong on computer". Not only do their techs not know their *** from their elbow, but their hours and hours of unsuccessful efforts have ****ed up my computer so badly I have lost valuable programs and documents. | | They do not answer Certified Mail and emails, so it looks like they are blowing me off. Maybe if some entity more powerful than Consumer Sucker leans on them? | | I understand such "ombudsman" or whatever you call them, do exist, so maybe you resourceful people can direct me. | | TIA | | HB
That's a good point, and ties in with the fact that Avast is an antivirus/antimalware package. It is not a product designed to address other issues with one's pc. If Higgs believed that it was an inclusive pc repair product, then either the person who sold it to Higgs lied, or Higgs misunderstood what the product is used for.
Both true, and again, the best one can expect from the support for an antimalware product is help getting the product to perform its intended purpose. If there are other issues with the pc unrelated to detecting and removing malware, Avast can't address them, and neither will the support tech, since it is out of the product/support contract's scope.
Since Higgs' account is so short on details, we don't know if the problems she was having were connected with malware/its removal, or if they were unrelated to it. We don't know if the problems arose as a result of an attempt by the phone support tech to do something with her pc. We don't know if a backup was performed prior to the phone support tech's efforts. Thus, we have no idea what was wrong, when it went wrong, whether it was anything Avast was designed to deal with, and if there is any backup that Higgs could restore her pc back to.
Higgs: a number of us on this forum do computer support/service work either as a living or as a sideline. First point that is constantly made to pc users is that data protection is primarily the user's responsibility. It is your data. If you value it, back it up regularly. At a minimum, set up Windows backup to create regular backups. I'd also use external storage - a flash drive or an external hard drive - as a secondary backup. If you find all of this too confusing, there are subscription-based data backup and recovery services such as Crashplan that will, once it is installed, automatically back up your data and store it on the service company's servers, where it is available for you not only in the event of a computer crash/data loss, but also if you are away from your pc and need to access anything stored on it.
Second point: don't buy or install anything on your pc - even if somebody recommends it - until you've read up on it and understand what it is used for and how *you* will use it. That includes reading up on competing products that perform the same function. You will then be armed with the knowledge you need to determine if the product will be useful for you, and know what to expect from it.
That should be a red flag right there. I've had several boxes that went flaky when the video adapter started to fail. The symptoms don't necessarily point to the card, and replacing it, while easy, isn't something they can do over the phone.
We've had clients, supposed 'IT professionals', that have managed to fubar systems. The last part of that acronym is 'Beyond All Repair'.
Have you a link to whatever it is you bought? I've used avast! for many years...AFAIK, they have no such product. They deal in software, not "policies".
On 19 Aug 2014, Higgs Boson wrote in alt.home.repair:
I don't believe that they sell any such product. Please cite a specific reference to it.
There are many things that can go wrong with a computer that they couldn't, shouldn't and wouldn't fix. It would be idiotic for a company to make that claim.
It is time for you to bite the bullet and call in a professional. Ask around your neighborhood for referrals. Geek Squad are not professionals. They are High Skol students with two weeks training.
I had a customer buy a custom computer from me and expected me to warrant every screw up she did on it. I was very clear that I only covered the hardware, not the usage. She got pretty pissed when I insisted. Oh did she screw things up!
Some people shouldn't own computers.
Higgs! Look at an iPad. They are pretty easy to use and pretty hard to screw up. They are great for receiving information, but horrible for creating things. You can get a keypad for them if you do a lot of typing.
I wonder if Higgs didn't get a hold of one of those fraud criminals that clam to be from this of that company and charge you to fix what isn't wrong. They like camp on type'ed phone numbers similar to legitimate companies.
The rule is that only 10% of professionals actually know what they are doing. A good way to tell computer professionals apart is if they are arrogant or they refuse to share information.
I've got a vintage rusty IBM Selectric in the garage. A little WD-40 and she'll be good as new! That would be about the right for this person, I think.
Hi, I tried Avast anti-virus program. It is memory hog, finding that out I dumped it. Did not cost any $$. Worst is they try to come into your computer with your permission of course saying they need to get in there to fix the problem. Then god only knows what they are upto. Any thing is fixable but it is a matter of economics. I help all my friends, neighbors, family with their questions and issues when it comes to with their computer of any sort. After all that was my career for ~40 years.....(in super large scale systems)
I used to fix screwed up computers in a corporate environment. I got to know who seemed to go out of their way to f*ck things up time and time again. Since they got them fixed for "free", they just didn't care... and yet they were the most demanding and impatient of any. I guess it's a combination of attitude and work flow. Some people seem to instinctively know how to avoid some computer problems. Some people rush right into them.
Nowadays I do it just for friends and family. My sister's kids regularly invite viruses and other malware into the family computer. They don't care, maybe because I swoop in to fix things when they get so bad that, say, my sister can't do her online banking because of all the popup ads. I'm happy to bail her out as often as need be, but the kids need a good spanking. Too bad they're 18 years old and 3000 miles away.
On 20 Aug 2014, Tony Hwang wrote in alt.home.repair:
I've been using Avast Free for years and nobody had ever tried to do any such thing.
Memory use is on par with or better than most other anti-virus solutions I've used. Right now, Task Manager reports that it's using about 35 MB or RAM.
Hi, Years ago at the infancy of PC when 4 Mb hard drive cost couple grands, I was an EIC a at local university looking after their main system involved in software development. One day one of the faculty secretary called me in panic saying she can't use word processor any more, it is stuck. When I took a look at the problem she never deleted or stored backed up files externally on floppies. literally hundreds of saved letter files were plugging up the machine. She thought almighty computer had endless file saving capacity. When I explained things she seemed quite surprised.....
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