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Thursday October 20, 2005

Tesco killed Grandpa's PC

A name and shame for you.

I have to do a lot of tech support for my extended family and it's tedious. I wish I could put them all onto a stable, decent operating system that didn't keep patching itself, downloading virus updates and requiring resource slurping firewalls...... let's not go there again.

Particularly annoyed with Tesco this time. My stepfather's (my kids call him Grandpa) email stopped working and so he started an email conversation with the support line on my mum's pc. I was out of contact at the time so he bravely went ahead, what could be the worst that could happen after all? ;-) Now he's nearly 80, so you can excuse him for not knowing everything about how the internet works.

The support people (incorrectly) surmised the problem was with his antivirus software (AVG from Grisoft.com - very good btw). So they asked him to uninstall it and try the email again. Fair enough. The email didn't work. So they told him to reinstall AVG...

"How do I do that then?" asks Grandpa.
"Go to a search engine and type AVG" says mister Tesco support.
"I've got 'Free Antivirus downloads'. Is that the one I want?" asks Grandpa.
"Yes, that's it. Download that and run it." says mister Tesco support.

Well, guess what. If you type AVG into askjeeves, the first entry that comes up is a sponsored link. It does indeed say 'Free Antivirus downloads", but it sure as hell isn't AVG from Grisoft. It's some dodgy outfit called stop-sign.com and a quick search on google reveals it's a nice bunch of spyware. When I found out I told Grandpa to pull his network card out until I got there. Nice one Tesco.

Bearing in mind that this 'tech support line' costs 50p/minute, I think we deserve someone a bit more savvy on the end of the phone. Hardly surprising we end up with this is it?

As we are wont to do in the UK, a stiffly worded letter will be sent.

( Oct 21 2005, 10:02:12 AM BST / Oct 20 2005, 05:42:38 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]
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