RHFtech Help Desk (and more)

Are you overwhelmed with the minutiae of modern life? Who isn’t? reQall is a service that helps us deal with the deluge of things we have to remember and attend to.

You use it by typing text into the application or speaking into your telephone. The speech-to-text facility is surprisingly accurate in my testing. It has been almost letter perfect in every one of my trials. It puts a similar feature in Google Voice to shame.

A moment ago I spoke the following to the reQall automated telephone attendant, “To-Do Sunday July 25th at 3:30 check reQall see if it transcribed this message.”

I got an email a few minutes later that read, “Reminder for 3:30 PM: To-Do: Sunday, July 25th at 3:30 PM, check reQall see if it transcribed this message.”

I am impressed.

reQall has both free and paid versions (AKA reQall Standard and reQall Pro). Pro costs $24.99 per year or $2.99 per month, and has several additional features compared to the free Standard version.  They provide a free 15 day trial of the Pro version so you can test the service before paying them.

You can use it to set up appointments, tasks, reminders, and shopping lists. The Pro version has location awareness so that if you tell it you want to buy fruit at Costco it will remind you when you are near Costco.

reQall works on Windows and Mac computers. It can be accessed via a web browser. They provide free apps for Android, BlackBerry and iPhone cell phones. You can also set up several landlines to work with the service as well.

reQall integrates with Outlook (both versions), Google Calendar (both versions) and Evernote (Pro version only). If you want reQall will send you text message (Pro version only) and email reminders (both versions). They even provide an RSS feed for your reQall items. You can share your reQall items with people in your BlackBerry or iPhone contact list.

Everything isn’t perfect though. The iPhone app is a bit clunky and the web descriptions and tutorials do not do justice to the elegance of the service. They also do a mediocre job of explaining what the service is or how to use it. I suspect the folks at reQall are engineers and not marketers.

I like what I see. My testing indicates that this service is useful and probably worth paying for the Pro version. I suggest you try it out. I think you will agree.

It is common for someone to call me to help them after they have tried other solutions, such as calling their computer maker, Internet provider or another support provider, such as the Geek Squad.

No power

Several years ago I got a call from a man who had a Dell desktop computer that would not boot. He said he had spent 4 hours trying to fix the problem with a Dell customer service representative, located somewhere in Asia.

I arrived at my new client’s place. The computer was apparently dead. Nothing happened when the power switch was pushed. I thought it might be a dead power supply. Since I was there already, I opened the case, thinking to reseat the boards attached to the motherboard. I began by pulling and reinstalling the two RAM cards. I pushed the power button and the machine started up. It took me about 5 minutes to get the machine going again. I believe it is still working today.

No sound

Earlier this week I got a call about a loss of sound on an HP desktop computer. The caller said that he had spent five hours on the phone, over two days, with HP service representatives in India. The problem remained.

Once I got there, I diagnosed and fixed the problem in 90 seconds. The cable to the speakers was in the wrong socket.

Since I was there the new client asked me to look at some other things. The first thing I did was to show him how to use the Vista user interface (UI) since he was new to Vista. I love the Start menu search box so that was where our Vista tutorial began. I typed “Excel” in the Search bar expecting to have Excel 2007 pop up at the top of the results pane. It didn’t. I searched All Programs to no avail. I asked if he knew why Word 2007 was on the machine but not Excel or PowerPoint.

He said that he had bought the machine from Best Buy and paid the Geek Squad to install the machine. He had purchased a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Home & Student from Best Buy at the same time. He did not know why all of the programs hadn’t been installed. Best Buy had neglected to provide him with an installation disc, and more importantly his Microsoft Office 25 digit product key.

I grabbed the Office 2007 product key from Word 2007 using special software I carry and reinstalled the product using the trial version that HP had put on the machine. Fortunately, I didn’t need to “activate” the install by using the product key because the machine already recognized it from the installed version of Word 2007. My new client is happy with me but not Best Buy, the Geek Squad or HP.

No Internet

Yesterday, I saw a new client who had a router failure. She had tried to deal with the problem by calling her ISP, Optimum (AKA Cablevision). They couldn’t diagnosis the issue so they had her turn off the Belkin router and connect her laptop directly to the cable modem. This reduced her security since the router’s hardware firewall was no longer protecting her and she could not roam her condo with her laptop but at least could access the Internet.

It took me about 15 minutes to reinstall and reconfigure the router so that it worked both wired and wirelessly.

The preceding are instances of when a customer needs onsite support and neither a voice from across the ocean nor a disinterested, low-paid employee of a giant corporation will do. I provide that onsite support.

I frequently install HP printer and all-in-one software for myself and clients. It never works the way the instructions indicate. NEVER!!!!!!!!! And it takes forever to install.

Have the software engineers at HP ever tried to use this stuff? My experiences suggest the answer is no.

Setting up these devices on networks is a waste of time since the network setup rarely sees the devices during installation. The software never see the scanner part of these devices. So network scanning is reduced to using the device’s built-in web client rather than the HP Pro Scan utility that comes with the device.

I think it is time to switch to Canon or Brother in the hope that their engineers know how to code installation applications.

DropBox is a file service that lets you keep files synchronized effortlessly on multiple computers, locally or remotely.

It works extremely well. It works with Windows, Macs and Linux operating systems. You can even access your files from a remote computer by signing into your account via a web browser, such as Internet Explorer, and downloading the files.

DropBox offers a free account with 2GB of storage and a paid account, $99/year or $9.99/month, with 50GB of storage.

I highly recommend it. If you want to check it out click here.

Full disclosure: I will get additional space added to my free account for referrals.

If the rest of the world treated me this way I would feel like royalty.

My post of March 21, 2009, Another angry Cablevision customer, recounts my frustrating and anger inducing experience talking with the billing department about what happened after the technical department fixed a problem with my service.

Yesterday I was called by Cablevision’s Andrea W., a polite, kind lady, who wanted to fix this issue. She listened to my side of the event and was the first person to understand that:

1. I did understand what Cablevision’s “revised” bills were about.
2. From my point of view, Cablevision had surprised me with a very large unannounced set of new bills, forever accelerated what I owed them by two weeks, and that the lack of sympathy and concern on the part of the “robotic” agents in the billing department was off-putting, frustrating and anger inducing. After all, Cablevision had caused the problem and fixed it by screwing up my account.

Additionally, another employee, Jim M., has been following me on Twitter and sending me private posts to see if this situation can be resolved. It is fantastic that a multi-billion dollar company would reach out to resolve my complaint this way.

I am usually an advocate of Cablevision’s services. They usually offer bleeding edge services, top-notch technical support, and reasonable pricing, especially compared to the alternatives. My experience with the billing department made me rethink my unpaid evangelism.

On Tuesday night, at my CTPC presentation on Social Networking for the 21st Century: Facebook and Twitter, one of the members who had moved out of the Cablevision territory related his unhappy experiences with Comcast and AT&T’s Uverse.

My typical reply to people who complain to me about Cablevision is that they could experience really bad service if they had AT&T, Charter, Comcast, or Time Warner instead. Andrea W. knows. She works for Cablevision but lives in a Time Warner location.

I am gratified and impressed that Cablevision respected and responded to my concerns. Sometimes large corporations get it right. This is one of those times.