Tom Swift said:
Leaving aside the questionable tone of the poster's comments, the OP did
say:
That's easy to say, but the tone is relevant. A person came for help
to a place that he considered relevant and he got flamed for it. If
the poster did leave that tone aside, he would not have posted at all
since he contributed nothing to the response.
"Both problems have happened ever since I bought the computer a month ago,"
which can be understood to mean that the problems have existed ever since
the user first pressed the power button. Since the vendor is responsible for
delivering a computer in perfect working order, it is reasonable to ask the
OP to contact the vendor.
Yes, it's reasonable and he tried that.
I think most people who have supported computer users would not take
the "ever since" part so literally. He obviously did not have the
problem even before the machine booted up. Perhaps he had them from
the first day. Perhaps not. In either case, this is not the type of
problem that somebody has right out of the box.
So I agree that it can be taken to mean that, but I would not take it
that way. I don't think you would either since you know it's likely
that something else caused it.
However, once a user upgrades the computer in any way not specifically
recommended by the vendor, the user is pretty much on her/his own. In
exchange for a lower price, Microsoft does not support OEM installations of
its software.
That's correct too. And he went here to a public forum for that
reason, which seems entirely reasonable. Had the timing been a bit
different, I might have responded immediately with a post on how he
can fix it in his registry and everybody would have been happy.
The bigger issue is that this seems to be related to the installation
of specific products, and it is not. It's hard to track down these
issues, since much of what is posted is both product specific, (the
solution is at the OS level and not the application level, but posts
tend to link this to a specific application) inaccurate (posts point
to a workaround but give the wrong reason for needing it) and does not
explain what caused it in the first place. Indeed, it's not limited to
XP for that matter. So if somebody posts the one byte registry change
that fixes it, it solves the problem. I did that elsewhere in the
thread and hope that obviates the need for somebody to bring this up
again.
Since the OP did get a response here that fixed his problem, it seems
in retrospect that he did the right thing by posting here, and the
vendor would not have been able to do a thing about it.
