Microsoft Tech Support - Amita Pandey
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006
It’s not often I get to write about someone, but this will be an exception. About four month ago I installed Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 to try it out. I then upgraded to IE7 Beta 3 a month after. Beta 3 fixed some of the problems with how sites were being rendered it bought another set of problems with it. This time I could no longer get security updates for Windows XP Pro.
I noticed there was an issue with the Windows updates about three weeks ago and decided to do a manual update from the system. I could reach the Microsoft update site and go through the first set of motions and then clicked on ‘Custom’ instead of express. At that point the Microsoft updater starts checking and you get a green bar going around and around while it checks the computer for updates. This is where the problem started. The updater would not update and carried on checking and checking, I even left it once for three hours and came back and it was still checking. I disabled Outpost Firewall, NOD32 Antivirus and the Broadband Wireless Router but still nothing.
I decided to call Microsoft Tech Support for some help. After a few explanations I got through to the Tech service in India. At first I was not happy about this. Previously my record of calling Tech support help-lines in India has broken down at times with a varying set of misgivings and emotions ranging from being rude, mistrust, outright hostility and being passed around from one support phone to another. O2 and HSBC come to mind. The worst of the bunch was 3G support which broke down to something short of threats from either side. Generally speaking it is safe to say I hate outsourced support. The language barriers and the hold-ups can lead a person to manic rage. Trying to get hold of a HSBC bank manager is an experience that puts you close to actually going down to the bank in person and nothing short of causing havoc. You are faced with giving personal bank details to a foreign country over the phone and then told your balance and details of your accounts and finally told you cannot speak to your bank manager. I won’t dwell on this too much now…
The Six Hour Session
Back to Microsoft Tech Support in India, and getting put through to a woman named Amita Pandey who had more of a French accent than an Indian one. Amita is a real class-act and should be a case study in ‘How to do it right’ her patience and understanding of technical problems and her language skills is something else. I don’t have any patience and I lack in this department. Somehow I managed to spend six hours on the phone with Amita while we battled furiously with the problem of the updater. Not at any time did either of us lose our sense of reason. We went through the entire process time and time again trying to pin-point this problem. To say Amita Pandey was helpful would be an understatement. Amita is a woman who clearly relishes her job at Microsoft and enjoys getting down to the nitty-gritty of problems. Halfway though this gruelling debacle of rebooting (I lost count of how many reboots) we stopped for a break.
Process of Elimination
Ten minutes later the phone rang in my studio and she was back on and we started going through a process of elimination and trying out various scenarios to eliminate the problem. One of the things we tried is the following:
In Safe Mode:
Stop all Start-Up Services
Uninstall NOD32
Uninstall Outpost Firewall
Stop Wireless Router
Plug directly into broadband connection
Start
Run
C:\WINDOWS
SoftwareDistribution Folder
Rename to SoftwareDistributionOld
System32 Folder
Catroot
Rename Catroot
Reboot into Normal Mode
At this point after rebooting Internet Explorer 6 (We had uninstalled IE7) was extremely slow, it would not show the Microsoft Home page or update page. We had to restore some crucial files. The following files are easy to restore. Go to:
Start
CMD
When the command box paste the following in:
regsvr32 softpub.dll
regsvr32 wintrust.dll
regsvr32 initpki.dll
regsvr32 dssenh.dll
regsvr32 rsaenh.dll
regsvr32 gpkcsp.dll
regsvr32 sccbase.dll
regsvr32 slbcsp.dll
regsvr32 cryptdlg.dll
This restores the .dll’s. At that point we were able to enter the site. It also helps to enable all ActiveX settings in Internet Options.
This seemed to let us finally reach the Microsoft Update Center. Most updates were installed except for a few. We could not get them. Amita sent them toas a link via email, I then could download them manually.
Unresolved
Once all updates were installed we rebooted. The problem is still there and the case is unresolved. Though I have all the critical updates, I still can’t update the system alone. As a result we will continue this session in about 10 days time when my copy of XP pro arrives from Microsoft. The copy I had was damaged and they are going to send another copy, to see if we can reinstall IE6 to its original settings.
I managed towards the end to get some small talk and find out a bit about the person on the other end of the phone. I think sometimes it is important at times to engage the tech assistants in some human interaction, and let them know that ‘we know you are real and your doing a great job’ it makes for some real pleasant relations.
Six hours is a long time to resolve an issue on the phone. It made realize the importance of patience and I learnt some in the meantime. I also learned you cannot judge an entire profession by a few people who do not do it right. I put this firmly down to who their employers are, and which employers takes the time to teach their staff the right way to do things. In this case Microsoft has done it right.
