technical support

I've recently had some very bad experiences with paid technical support and I'm wondering if anyone else shares my dismay.

I'm responsible for about 40 servers which support services for approximately 15,000 people so you might imagine that good 24x7 technical support is fairly important to me. The last several months of dealings with two companies in particular have my blood pressure way higher than it need be.

Last summer I had it with HP support. My first dealings with them proved to be successful back in 2006, but something terrible has happened since. My brother who lives in Oregon needed help with getting his HP PC up and running after it had been infested with "Internets". I felt bad that I instructed him to to re-partition his box without checking with him first if he had his OEM cd's. Okay... secretly I wanted to get him to use those LiveCD's I sent him the year prior; just kidding, but that was what was left for him at that time.

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