A co-worker was having trouble with our Toshiba laptop. She was having trouble getting her laptop on her WiFi at home, after it had worked before. Since Qwest said it wasn’t their problem, she would need to call Toshiba. It was a bit over a year old, so technically out of warranty, but she figured she’d call Toshiba anyway. She went back and forth, trying a bunch of things, following his broken-english instructions, with Toshiba even suggesting a full restore on the system which would’ve killed all here data and programs.
She brought it in to me, and sure enough, I couldn’t connect to any WiFi networks, either. It wasn’t detecting any networks, so the thing was getting disabled or something. And sure enough, the tiny little WiFi power switch next to the USB ports on this particular laptop was turned to “Off.” Flip the switch to “On”, and look at that, it magically works.
Now I didn’t expect my co-worker to see that switch (it is quite small), nor to know what it does (she does now), but why on earth didn’t the Toshiba tech suggest to look at that switch?
Comments
This constantly happens to my mother in law on Vaio laptop.
Because all outsourced tech support goes by a preset script. And I think that tech support ASSUMES the customer knows what the switch is for.
I could barely see the switch on this thing. I don’t know how that switch couldn’t have been on their script (and don’t worry, I know all about those stupid tech support scripts).
Maybe it’s like The Hitchhikers Guide when they go on Deep Black’s ship.
“With the black switch that lights up the black light to let you know that you’ve done it”
… or something like that.
Greg
I can’t tell you how often that happens to my user’s. It’s the first thing I check!
One thing you have to really keep in mind when you are dealing with foreign tech support – You are speaking with a person who proably could not afford to purchase the product they are supporting. Furthermore, they have probably never had a physical unit of the product to examine or use, therefore rendering them mostly useless for anything but the simplest of problems.
Also, most PC manufacturers have a restore process now that does not wipe the HDD, only the Windows directory. User data is usually fairly safe in these restore options.
this exact thing happened to me. wow. scary.
mine has an orange light tho, so after a lot of angry hours, i figured it out.
Ok,
I work tech support myself, for an ISP. Each and every time I get this problem, ( which is several times daily ) I have to grit my teeth because nobody seems to know that almost every laptop will have this switch and at the same time nobody can find it. I’ve managed to locate it on ANY laptop I’ve ever looked at, not that hard. Has the IQ level and initiative of people just plummeted in recent years. Lets face it, this is a Read the Fu****g manual resolve. And better yet, the box your lappie came in probaly has a big color picture on the back pointing out things such as, power, headphone jack, internet shortcut… WIRELESS SWITCH etc.