The Money Time Trade-Off : From the Founder's Desk

The Story of Tech Support: How Bad Tech Support Wastes Time and Energy

Today, I want to share a story about tech support—or rather, the lack of it—and how poor tech support wastes time and energy for both customers and organizations.

The Beginning of the Laptop Saga

Eighteen months ago, I bought a laptop. It was a well-known Japanese brand, seemingly high quality, and I was excited to start using it. The delivery from Amazon arrived smoothly, and everything looked great—until it wasn’t.

Within a month, the display stopped working. Diagnostics didn’t indicate any display failure; I had to figure it out myself. As a temporary fix, I started using an external monitor, which effectively turned my laptop into a desktop.

The Tech Support Runaround

That’s when I discovered the harsh reality: the Japanese company had no proper tech support in my country. The only listed service location was a WeWork address in Gurugram. When I visited the location, I realized there was no actual office there.

For several months, I continued using my external monitor workaround. Then, one day, my persistent nature led me to dig deeper. I discovered that another company handled support for this brand. I called them immediately. Surprisingly, they picked up—probably because very few people would have managed to track them down. Eventually, they replaced my laptop's display, and I was happy again.

A New Problem Emerges

Just as I was moving on from this ordeal, another issue surfaced. The laptop started behaving unpredictably—it would power on sometimes and refuse to start at other times. The issue was intermittent, and the temporary fix was pressing the reset battery button on the back of the laptop.

To address this, a request for a motherboard replacement was raised. The replacement was done quickly, and for a few days, everything seemed fine. Then, the same power issue returned.

The Downward Spiral

I continued using my laptop despite the problem, relying on the battery reset trick. But one day, I changed the battery profile, and things got worse. Now, the laptop would turn on, then hibernate within a minute, followed by a complete shutdown.

This constant crashing eventually corrupted my Windows installation. When I reached out to support again, I discovered that the support number had changed. Once again, I had to go through the hassle of tracking down the right contact.

When I finally got through, they informed me that the issue was related to the battery. However, since my laptop was now over a year old, the battery was out of warranty, and they refused to help.

After escalating my frustration, they finally sent an engineer to reinstall Windows. He spent four hours fixing it, but the very next day, the same problem returned. The laptop remained unusable for three months. We even started looking for a new one.

Solving the Issue Myself

Yesterday, I decided to take another look at the problem. The laptop worked fine for a while, so I reinstalled all my applications, thinking the issue might have resolved itself. But soon enough, the crashes started again.

This time, instead of seeking tech support, I decided to investigate the root cause myself. I ran a command to check the reasons for the last ten restarts. The logs pointed to updates as a possible trigger. Then, I checked when the laptop last went into hibernation—and it matched the time of the crashes.

Digging deeper, I discovered a setting that forced the laptop to hibernate on low power, even when plugged in. I disabled this setting, and just like that, everything started working perfectly again.

One simple setting had caused six months of frustration, wasted time, and unnecessary stress.

Lessons Learned

You think more when resources are scarce. If our company had been well-funded, we would have simply replaced the laptop instead of troubleshooting.

The person closest to the problem has the best chance of solving it. Tech support didn't fix the issue—I did.

Always look for the root cause. The answers are often hidden in the details, but if you keep investigating, the dots will eventually connect.

A better brand doesn’t always mean better quality. Do your own evaluation before making a purchase.

Tech support should always have workarounds. A good support team should offer practical solutions instead of just replacing parts blindly.

All’s well that ends well—but what a frustrating journey it was!