Computer Support: Do It Yourself or Delegate?

As I get older, my patience for toying with my PC wears thin. There was a time when I actually liked troubleshooting a slow system. I got a total adrenaline rush if I called a problem right. I'm so over it.

Now that there are online services willing to troubleshoot my PC from afar, I decided to put them to the test and see how they fared. My first call was to HiWired.com. It provides a combination of onscreen or over-the-phone chat along with remote diagnostics and troubleshooting. In other words, you can talk to a human while they're working on your PC from a remote location.

Interestingly, HiWired used mostly off the shelf diagnostic components—things like AVG anti-virus and LogMeIn—for our remote session, all things I've used before. But just having a live person on the other end who's seen a lot of PCs in trouble was a comfort.

The first thing my online tech did was have me download a small application to do what they call PC Check & Connect while we were chatting together. Check & Connect is free when you sign up at HiWired. It runs diagnostics to check security, looking for viruses and P2P networks that might cause a problem, and looks at your system status items, such memory and processor speed.

Here's a great example of the kind of thing farming out my support taught me. The diagnostics reported that I had 57 processes running at startup. (That means my computer is pretty busy; I can brew a pot of coffee while I'm booting up my machine in the morning.) I've known that I had 57 processes running in my startup forever. (Just open Windows Task Manager with Ctrl-Alt-Del, click on processes, and you'll know, too.) But I never knew if 57 processes were excessive or normal. My online tech told me that normally you'll have 20 to 30 processes running, and then suggested a strategy for me to identify processes that often put themselves in the startup menu as the default (you hear that QuickTime?!).

By the way, I taught the tech guy a thing or two also. His diagnostics reported that I wasn't using anti-virus software. Well, I was. I was using Norton 360—apparently it's new enough that HiWired didn't recognize it.

The PC Check Up & Connect part of HiWired is free. But, that's sort of like the doctor giving you the diagnosis for free. Getting well will cost you. A full restoration costs $129, but it will make sure that everything on your machine is up to date and squeaky clean. You don't even have to wait around for the tech to finish since they can do it all remotely without you. HiWired has a number of other plans, ranging from a single session to troubleshoot any problem (they'll even give buying advice) to an annual retainer.

Having someone else do your dirty work is a great luxury. HiWired handles problems you have with peripherals, connectivity issues, wireless issues, transferring files from one PC to another…and more. But, when it gets right down to it, it's like having your nails done (how's that for an analogy). The materials are the same, but the personnel do it all day long so they develop an efficiency.

Here's my advice. Check out HiWired's PC Check & Connect. It's free. If you understand what the tech tells you is ailing your PC, then you can probably fix it yourself. If you haven't a clue, it may be worth every penny. And if you want to treat yourself, go ahead and let someone else give your PC a tune-up for once. Next, I'll have a look at another popular online help service, Support.com.