You should be happy THEY helped you find the link COMPAQ should have provided.

btw, threating to write a bad piece on your website is not the way to get any simpathy or support

http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback64.html“ target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback64.html

“I am going to share with everyone a huge fiasco I found myself in with the folks at Creative Labs. If you remember, I reviewed a Compaq GX5000Z gaming system last November.”

you should contact HP/Compaq, not the 3rd party hardware providers who made their products to HP's specifications. Buying Compaq/HP/Dell/.. != building your own PC. Messing with the internals is against the company policies. Read up on it before you start shouting out that Creative did nothing to help you.

I am wondering if anyone here can help me.
i bought a creative jukebox (zen xtra, 30 gb) about 5 months ago. the warranty under creative is only 3 months, so they wont help me.
The player seems to be functioning normal except i cant hear anything. it plays, it turns on and off, but there is no sound. someone else mentioned the headphone jacks on these players dont last very long, and that you can resolder the jack
does this work? Is it hard to do? does anyone recomend this, any other ideas?

thanks!!!
Kristen

Sorry for the late reply, I didn't catch it until now. This is the driver that the Creative moderator pointed me too and it seems to be working: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?locBasepartNum=wk-18679-3&lang=English&attTypeId=110“ title=”http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?locBasepartNum=wk-18679-3&lang=English&attTypeId=110“ target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/S…

Hope that helps!

Best,

Ian

Company aren't willing to train techies to ensure that they are well informed about issue pertain to the products. New products release in such speed that thorough testing for cross-compatibility no longer that crucial resulting in lot of hardware/software compatibility issue.

If you visit the Creative Labs website, you will notice that the Discussion forums are categorized under the “Support” tab and section of the Creative Labs website. Saying the forums are there for “user interaction” is a false claim.

Secondly, if you read my article, you would have noticed that I contacted BOTH Creative Labs and Compaq. I shared with everyone my e-mail response from Creative. They would rather sell me a new driver CD than try to solve my problems.

Has anyone else noticed that companies are adding discussion forums on their websites as a means for cheap tech support? I know that Dell has discussion forums that people use. I also notice now that all too often in the instruction manual's under the help or support section, they direct you to their website forums for help rather than give you a tech support phone number.

Thanks for all of the feedback, these stories are great. Keep em coming!

I did have to RMA a HDD to Western Digital once though. Their whole process is very simple and I got a replacement within 5 days of sending the harddrive OVERSEAS to singapore. Thats how quick it was. Even with 2-3 day shipping there and overnight DHL back. :)

User rings me up and say why hasn't this happened yet? my desired response is “because thats the way it is suck it up OR complain to your manager who might complain to his manager who might then complain to my managers manager and then they might sort out the process, but that would be pretty amazing if something actually changed…” but of course you can't really say that, you just sit there and say “work in process dont have an ETA” silence, wait for them to go “Ok, bye” then answer the next call….

All comes down to the managers, you get good ones and you get **** ones

BRAVO!!!!

I've worked tech support for several years now and can attest to this exactly. Our department here has the highest employee turnover rate of any other department in our company. We continually hire underqualified, or non-qualified individuals in hopes that a couple might stick around. Worse yet, those same under and non-qualified individuals are consistantly promoted into higher levels of support so that the people who are qualified can deal with the increased volumes of customer inquiries because they are capable of actually serving the customers.

Truth be told, frontline support is your best bet anymore sadly enough, the higher up you go, the less competance you will encounter.

These individuals are trained at “getting people off the phone” not fixing problems.

Speaking of which, I am at work now, and just got off the phone with a customer that I spent over an hour with because one of the people they are promoting from customer service into tech support screwed up the registry…Mind you this individual is usually challenged in their ability to chew food without choking on their own saliva, but that is irrelevant at this point ;)

If people want to know what is happening to tech support today, I give you exhibit A!!!

Granted there is the regular barrage of stupid people that we deal with on a daily basis, and some people are easier and better served by referring to other support given certain conditions. The habit of tech support just passing the buck is now standard practice, and sadly it has become that way because of the very practices in which the “technicians” are hired to begin with.

I can't speak for everyone who works tech support of course, but I do remember the days when tech support used to be a place where you would find some of the smartest and most knowledgeable people in most organizations due to their overall versatility.

I would like to appologize personally for the incompetance of administration, and the restrictions that have been placed onto their real technicians due to the inadaquacies of the idiots they hire.

Most of us genuinly do want to help the customers that contact us. Then again, those of us are qualified for these positions don't read scripts, and we usually appologize when we run into those barriers of things we cannot support, and most of us real techs will try to point you into the right direction even when it oversteps the boundries of the support we are authorized to provide.

My thoughts. If the people want better tech support. Stop supporting BAD tech support by calling them, or contacting them at all. Complain as much as you possibly can regarding policies the techs have to adhere to.

Mind you that when you speak with a few hundred people every week, you aren't going to make everyone the happiest customer on earth because all of those customers will obviously have their own definition of support and what they think you should do. I am of course referring to people who will call up their ISP and request support for a video game or printer, or those that contact any support they have a number to and complain nobody will help them because their manufacturer, or relavant support is in India and they do not speak english.

/end rant

It's an unfortunate situation I've found for many a tech support job – hire someone cheap, they learn quickly on the job or leave, the company gets to keep them at low wage and hence makes a killing. The biggest loser in the whole thing are the poor people who rely daily on those undertrained, underpaid and overworked tech support people who got tricked into being thrown in the deep end for something that was way above their head.

Three weeks later I bumped into her again at the same pub and she literally broke into tears. She had been on the phone to Dell techies many, many times in that interval and she was no closer to getting her problem fixed. She described what was happening when she talked to Dell and I simply couldn't believe it was possible. I went home with her again called them myself to experience it first hand.

I was on hold for most of the first 45 minutes before I was finally connected to a techie. I told the techie right off the bat that there was no hard drive in the computer, but he had a script to follow and there was no room in the script for common sense. After questioning me for 10 minutes and having me do things with the computer and report results back to him, he finally agreed that there was a “hard drive problem”. So, of course, the very next thing he wanted me to do was reformat the hard drive. There was absolutely no budging him from this position: he *explicitly* stated that his script said to tell me to reformat and there was no going on to the next step until I reported back that I had done just that.

I was ready to pull my hair out after going through this just once, but the owner of the computer had been going through the same thing several times a day for three weeks. I told her not to call them anymore and talk to a lawyer instead. Two days later a courier company came and packed up her computer and returned it to Dell.