(just FYI)
From my few meager months as a phone tech for a nationwide Dial-up ISP, this is the common knee-jerk (and much supressed) reaction/ (although it did slip thru commonly)
*click*
us: Hello, thank you for calling blah blah blah. This is Drag Sidious, may I get your name please?
them: Oh I am blah blah blah
us: (after 15 seconds to confirm identity and begin the report) Ok Mr. blah blah what can I help you with?
them: My modem is broken, tell me how to fix it.
us: Oh, I'll try, hehe (gag me with a spoon), what operating system are you using?
them: What's a operating system?
us: It's the what your computer runs off of, you know like windows 98 or 95, windows 2000 or win-XP
them: Ah it's Win-xp!
us: cool could you please right click.....
(5 seconds later)
us: I don't think this is XP, could you do me a favor realy quick?
them: sure...
us
k go and close everything out and then right click on the "my computer" icon and select properties
them:You want me to close this out, too? Quicken...
us: (?!) ya sure, just close everything out, just right
them: Oops it froze...
us: Ok just hit ctrl-alt-...
them: oh I just shut it off....
(3 minutes later)
us: Ok Ok just right click
them: but..
us: no it's ok just right click on it.
them: It just opens it up! what do you want?!
us: The mouse has 2 buttons, on the right the other on the left, your left clicking on it, I want you to hit the right button.
them: Oh, doh. Thanks!
us. don't worry about it, happens all the time. (I have a quick mental flashback to the time when I had a call from a left-handed guy that switched the mouse buttons around)
them: ok I right clicked on it what am I looking for?
us: just read it from the top:
them: ok, windows M E 50682.2349....
us: OK, your using winME.. sorry.
them: what?
us: ever think about upgrading?
them: what?
us: ever think about downgrading?
them: what?
us: nevermind, I need you close that out, then open up the start menu and go to the control panel....
From then on most everybody assumed there computer was f-ed up. Luckly it will turn out to be a "driver issue" that we weren't allowed to deal with we'd have to OEM it, but if the error codes weren't the right ones then we would be forced to talk them thru uninstall and reinstall dial-up-networking and uninstall and reingstall tcp/ip among a few other steps like deleting the saved passwords and stuff I only remember vaguely....
With WinME it was a 50-50 chance that that would just screw the computer up. Win98 could handle it mostly, win95 is ok, but had trouble with some software modems, win2k was cool that almost never blew up. WinXP was a bit more irritating because all the menus and wizards and crap would realy slow you down because the person usually would ignore you until they were finished reading all the information in each dialog window and ask questions about it, but for the most part it did what it was suppose to.
The 20-30% of the time when WinME (win98 would do this to, but the percentage was closer to 10-15% when you'd have to do major surgury) would kick the bucket it would get ugly with the person accusing your for frying his computer. Then you'd have to agrue quick and smart and point out that stuff like (uninstalling, reinstalling TCP/IP then rebooting the computer) that wouldn't hurt a healthy computer, and that the first thing we had to do in the phone call before anything else was to shut down the computer because it locked up.(most of the time when the computers got to this point they were simply so unstable that it couldn't work the modem properly no more, but the drivers were still decent enough not be the issue)
WinME was pretty much universially feared by the phone techs.
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