Speedlinking: Family Tech Support Roundup

Yes, it is family tech support season again. If you know how to install Firefox, you are regarded as a technological god and are automatically recruited to fix anything that contains a transistor. Now back at home for Christmas, geeks are recruited to fix aging computers and setup new ones.

I was going to write more about this but I found that many people have already covered this.

Here is the list:

• Russell Beattie rounds up the difficulties of guiding a user through Vista over the phone.
• Here is an excellent Slashdot thread of the “Tech Support Generation”
• Dale Tudge’s article ‘Becoming The Family Tech Support Guru‘ shows how “you’ll be the family’s F1 key if they find out that you know everything about computers”.
• ‘The Computer Geeks Who Saved Christmas‘ from the Washington Post outlines an engineer who’s “got stuck with the job of being his family’s fix-it guy because he is an engineer who works on mainframe supercomputers…[which] does not have a lot in common with the typical $500 Dell laptop, but his family members seem to think his day job should make removing pesky computer viruses and spyware a snap.”

• cnet has a simple guide on providing family tech support.