Tech Support - MSN Messenger

An acquaintance of mine from Rotary called me to do a little tech support for them. Every time the clicked on MSN, it would tell them to contact support because they couldn't get on the Internet. I asked some standard questions and found out that their are on dial-up, their ISP is MSN, and the use the MSN Explorer software in order to check their email. (For those of you who don't know, the new MSN, is like the old AOL. They try to make you think that there is no Internet outside of their product.)

So I go over their, and after a few tests, I learned that they had a virus on their machine that attacked their virus, echemmm, MSN. So, I ran all my happy free-ware and open source utilities, got rid of the virus, and cleaned up the computer some. But the connection through MSN had been corrupted, so I created a manual connection and set it to automatically dial in, when they tried to access the Internet.

The next day, I got a call saying that the virus was back. So once again, I headed over there to see that the same virus had come back. And AVG didn't catch it because it hadn't been allow to update. So, I did some research and learned that there was a security hole in MSN.

So, I used my manual connection, loaded up firefox, and downloaded the newest version of MSN. Installed and tested. Connection was great, so I left again.

A few days later, I get a phone call again. "I cannot send an email". So, once again, I head over. The Rich Text Field for the body of the email just didn't appear. So I called MSN Support. "You have to download the new Windows Live Messenger to fix it." And then I asked the obvious question, "What the hell does Windows Live Messenger have to do with the Send email function in MSN Explorer." And he responds, "Well Sir, there are Dynamically Linked Libraries (Note that this was stated phonetically) that the Windows Live Messenger will update and fix the problem." Mentally, I strongly urged him to go f*** himself, out loud came, "If they are so closely tied together, why are they not a package?", his amazing reply was, "so people on Dial-up don't have to download both." Please, take a moment and think about that amazing statement. This made me fight every part of myself that wanted to scream out, "Here's your sign." And then I hung up, and downloaded Windows Live Messenger.

A few days later, I get a phone call, "I cannot connect to the Internet." Exasperated, I drive over there again, the manual connection was messed up with the installation of the required new messenger. So I fixed the manual connection, and checked the email problem to make sure it was fixed. It wasn't. Surprise surprise. So I called MSN Support again. "Oh, Well, you need to download the NEWEST MSN Explorer to go with your Windows Live Messenger."

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I quickly hung up on him. The cross of the frustration and injustice of this whole thing wasn't bad enough, but I had to explain this to my clients. Luckily, they believed that it wasn't my fault. So I wanted, for the 7 mb file to download. Started to install, and learned that the 7 mb file was simply the installer, it had to download the real programs yet. The typical installation was 93 mb. NINTY-THREE. So I selected "minimal". That was geared for people on dial up. With a teency weency 29 mb. This still took an hour. But, I finally installed this, tested everything and got them back up and running. I used to do tech support, I feel their pain, but by god.