When Technology Bites

For the past three months I have had an on going conversation with Virgin Media over problems I have been experiencing with my PC. Some to do with the Virgins PC Guard and then later, I thought to do with being hyjacked. We have had an engineer visit, a new modem and many conversations with their customer service department. Finally, after a further phones calls / departments and email tennis, I was told that it was an issue my end and that I needed to deal with it. Gee, that was helpful.I coudl ring their IT department where calls would be charged at x rate per minute.

So let me highlight a very different approach. I searched the internet and arrived at www.pchelpforum.com. I created an account, read a few posts and followed their instructions on posting to the PC Security forum. I join and first spoke to ‘Upgrader’ and ‘Jellybean.’ Jellybean was professional and welcoming, he was not dismissive of my lack of computer literacy, but still reinforced the neccessity to fulfil the requires outlined on the site before posting to the forum. He explained that once the information had been posted, their PC security would look at it for me.I asked how this service was supoprted to which he outlined the voluntary, supoprtive nature of the site. I was impressed. We talked about security, about PC Guard, about replacing PC Guard, and one or two issues that might be causing the problem. As I said, welcolming but professional.

Shortly after I have posted, maybe the next day, ‘Pancake,’ left me more instructions to follow and a list of further notes to post. I dutifully completed these, re-posted. Pancake gave me the thumbs up and so ar so good. As recommended, I ran AVG security, Malwarebytes and I am back up and running two days laters. So three months with Virgin vs 3 days with PChelpforum, you chose. So here is my recommendation of thanks. Did I mention there is a whole host of extra support there too?