Conant Correct by Claire Conant

This has to be my new favorite product. Okay, so my last post told about my frustrations with technical support. After my last response to them, I provided them the .nfo file that they wanted, and explained my concerns. In return, their support guy turned around, using their own tool, Jing, and gave me a little video with audio to explain what the .nfo file contains, and what precisely he was looking for.

He also showed me how with Windows Vista, some drivers are still being updated, and he found a new update for my video driver. I’m going to install that and see what happens.

I responded back to him and thanked him profusely. Seriously. How cool is that that he used their own product to provide what is now excellent service. Perhaps I was just cranky and tired earlier.

Moral of the tech support story: a little goes a long way. And use visuals and audio when you can. Jing can help you do that.

In a fast-paced world, full of instant gratification, fast information, quick, lightening speed visuals and sounds, it’s important to stop and read - or listen to - what your clients are telling you before you go running off to solve their problems. This is particularly true of support people of all types. I consider myself a support person of sorts, as I’m supporting an author or a client to make their message heard.

This particular topic comes up as I am dealing with a technical support person at TechSmith - creator of this fabulous new tool called Jing, that my colleague, Beth over at Life on Avenue Z, told me about.

I downloaded Jing and it’s the sweetest screen capture invention for free that I’ve seen yet. It shows up as a little half sun on the edge of your computer screen. When you hover over it, it expands to give you three options of capture. Click one, and off you go. You can even reposition where the half sun sits on your monitor.

After a few days, I needed to contact HP support for a completely  unrelated issue. After that issue was resolved to my satisfaction, I restarted my computer and noticed that Jing was no longer working. The half sun was frozen in place and was inactive. The only way I could get JIng to work was by launching the commands from the task bar - not my preferred method because I think that Jing’s screen launcher is the coolest method. So, I uninstalled Jing, and then reinstalled it. Still not working. I sent Techsmith an email with the problem:

"I love this tool, however, after a session with HP tech support yesterday for an unrelated issue, Jing is not working. I have the yellow half-sun graphic, with a black quarter circle near it, and when I hover over the yellow half sun, nothing works, but it did before. Hmmm. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Jing, but still the same issue."

Their response:

"We have had a few reports of this problem, but we have not yet found what is the cause. It is interesting that you describe this happening after working with HP. What kind of problem were you troubleshooting, was this a problem with your computer, or were you servicing a printer? Please give me some details of what was done on that call, as it may offer a clue as to what made this change in Jing’s behavior.
I would also like to get a System info file to help me troubleshoot this problem. Please click start > run and type msinfo32.exe then hit "ok". This brings up System Information. Click file > save as.. to save a .nfo report. Attach this to your reply."

Since there was no "save as" option, I sent them a .txt file - a bit nervous though as to why they need all that information. That file offers up everything about my computer. How do I know this support person is honest? But, I digress…

So, my response to her added more clarification:

"We were troubleshooting why my built-in microphone wasn’t working after Microsoft had me change my operating system from Vista Home Premium to Vista Enterprise. I loaded Jing onto Vista Enterprise and it worked fine. Then the troubleshooting with HP - we updated audio drivers and the BIOS. That’s all that I know we did - HP had remote control, but I was watching. I’ve attached the system information as a text file. There was no "save as" option, only save or export, so I chose export. Hope this helps. Oh, and Jing works, if I choose the image capture from the taskbar, not from the half sun at the top. I can’t move the half sun or get it to work, so I just turn off Jing now when I reboot."

Here’s the response I just got back that fried my eggs this morning:

"your system info file is not useful in this format, please try this again, and choose "Save" to save in the .nfo format.
If you updated your audio components or major Windows components after installing Jing, this may be causing Jing to not appear correctly. Please unisntall Jing, then reinstall Jing, and let me knwo if this solves the problem.
Jing should still work for you, this is just a display problem. If you click "More" in the task tray icon for Jing, then go into preferences, you can uncheck "show launcher" to make the sun icon at top go away, then you can use Jing from either the task tray, or you can also set a hotkey, also in the preferences window.
Please advise."

Um…. didn’t I already tell her all that? In my first message I told her I’d already uninstalled and reinstalled it. I also tole her that it still works from the task tray (what I called the taskbar.)

Seriously. If you are a tech support person - and I say this as a reminder to myself as well - make time to stop, digest what your client tells you, before shooting from the hip. This tells the client you respect their time, you respect them, and it also gives you all the information you need - or most of it - to really troubleshoot the problem successfully and quickly, the first time - without ticking off your customer and making them repeat themselves.

And now I’ll probably have to eat my own words because I could be firing this off too fast and someone else reading my messages to the support people could be as equally confused as she was - so perhaps it’s all my fault anyway.

I came across this online, self-paced training that Microsoft provides for their products. This may be old news for some, but helpful for others.

For Word 2003: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR061958171033.aspx

For Word 2007: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR100654561033.aspx

And of course, you can find links to online training for all other Microsoft products.

I found out from my fellow freelance copywriter, Beth from Avenue Z Writing Solutions, that Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2008 is free. So, that’s what I’m using for now. Seeing as there’s only me here, and I don’t (yet) have a complicated employee and accounting system, it seems the easiest way to go. Downloading was easy and with most Microsoft products being released lately, there seems to be an emphasis on usability. I’ll report back with more when I have used it more extensively.

In building your own business, one thing that I know is important to get right from the very start is keeping clean and accurate records. To do this, I started looking into accounting software such as Quickbooks by Intuit or Microsoft Office Accounting. Not only does having the appropriate software make your operations tracking easier, but because things like invoices are already created for you, it reduces the time needed to create it yourself. So, in my hunt for software, I wanted to see a comparison of what was out there and I found this comparison chart on Wikipedia. Who knew there were so many different software programs?

If you run your own business, what software do you use? Once I’m done analyzing this exhaustive list, I’ll let you know what I’ve chosen to use.