OT : Sage support

I've been sorting out a friends business PC.

8 year old thing, 10GB C partition, 70GB D partition. (almost) Everything had
installed to C and all data saved to C. So no free space on C, loads on D, so
I thought it'd be a nice easy job.

It was, apart from the fucked PSU, Office, Sage and CA anti virus installed
to D.


Got it all working apart from Sage wasn't creating reports which I wasn't
aware of.

Friend discovered this and rather than walking 20 yards to my office and
letting me know, phones Sage support.

Who, after 5 (!!) hours on the phone (how much do Sage charge per minute?),
had instructed him to uninstall Sage, delete his company accounts, and then
uninstall .NET 3.5, 3, 2, 1.1 and 1.

And then they couldn't work out why Sage couldn't re-install itself.


What fucking muppets are they?

Dot NET 1.0 is preinstalled with bloody Windows, Sage relies on it, its not
there, so it can't install itself.


Anyway, gently bollocked friend for not coming to me in the first place,
reinstalled all the dot NET frameworks again, then Windows Update again and
got Sage back up and running.


Honestly, these support people are getting worse "Sorry our product doesn't
work, however do what I ask you to and I'll see if I can break everything
else too!".


Got me to thinking, is the easiest way of doing these jobs simply telling the
customer that they must backup ALL the data they want to save, then
clobbering the whole drive and simply re-installing Windows and the software
they've listed was on there and they have the media for?

Charging peanuts for this kind of thing, as you do for mates, its just not
worth the hassle trying to do it the hazardous, long winded way.

 

frag wrote:
snip

I get the impression they've outsourced so much of the development and
support that no one is actually responsible for anything anymore.

Just had a similar scenario upgrading our Sage ACT! contact management
software. I was at swear factor 9 by the time I finally got it installed
successfully and that was without dealing with the uninstall/reinstall
support drones.

Agree wholeheartedly, nuke it from orbit, then you know exactly what
you're playing with.

Too true, it's that 80/20 principle in extremis.

 

took a blunt brush and painted...

Yep, what I'll be doing in future (close friends excepted of course)

I think there's only a slim margin where it's cheaper to get someone in to
sort out old hardware rather than they go and buy a new PC and install all
the s/w again.