On Wednesday, August 20, 2014 7:38:33 AM UTC-4, Moe DeLoughan wrote:
On 8/19/2014 10:40 PM, Higgs Boson wrote:
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 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.
Not only
do their techs not know their *** from their elbow, but their hours
and hours of unsuccessful efforts
Efforts at what? Your lacks enough detail to make sense.
have ****ed up my computer so
badly I have lost valuable programs and documents.
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.
https://forum.avast.com
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.
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.
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.