ZTE Grand S II Offers 5.5-inch Screen, Quad-Core CPU and Voice Control

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From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

TeamViewer 9 review: Remote control software adds several very handy new features

TeamViewer 9 The latest version of TeamViewer's remote control software implements sessions in tabs, transfers all kinds of data via the clipboard, has two-factor mobile authentication and wakes-on-LAN.

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TeamViewer has saved my family and friends a lot of grief, and saved me a lot of gasoline. I just tell them to download and run (or install it), give me the code and password and voilà! Their desktop pops up in a window on mine so I can fix what ails it.

The TeamViewer console (shown with a remote session in the background) is largely the same, but has adopted with Windows 8 2D look.

TeamViewer 9 offers some very welcome improvements. My personal favorite is the ability to cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop files from the host desktop (the computer doing the controlling) to the client (the computer being controlled) and cut-and-paste from the client. It's much handier than opening the file transfer dialog as was required formerly, though that function still exists for working with older TeamViewer clients.

Multiple sessions now show in tabs instead of in separate windows, making things much neater. If a session needs your attention, the tab will light up. Also, you have the option of using secondary authentication (with an authenticator such as Google's) when you're connecting from a mobile device. Another improvement is the ability to send the Wake-on-LAN signal to remote computers so they don't have to be left on all the time. That can save a huge amount of power over time.

TeamViewer 9's appearance is now flattened to match Windows 8, though it maintains TeamViewer's signature color scheme. The other changes are largely for paid Business ($750) and Premium ($1500) subscribers. These include a new API with reporting and user management features, plus custom looks for modules that don't have to be redone with each iteration.

The options dialog shows the breadth of features TeamViewer offers.

The beta version of TeamViewer 9 that I tested seemed as stable and robust as version 8, meaning I had no problems with it. The only issues I've ever experienced with TeamViewer were several versions back and FTP-related. Other than that, it's been a rock.

I love the tabs, drag and drop, and wake-on-LAN. You should upgrade, as it remains free for personal use. Keep the new features coming, Teamviewer!

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

How to Disable Control Center from the iOS 7 Lock Screen

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From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: MightyText wields control over desktop texting

Free texting service MightyText actually manages to live up to its name.

The hardest part of using MightyText is the initial setup. Like many desktop texting services, it works with Android devices only, and requires that you install a mobile app on your phone. Once the mobile app is installed and you're ready to use MightyText on your computer or tablet, you have to do a bit of tinkering with your browser's settings if you'd like to receive notifications of new messages. But MightyText guides you through the process— which involves changing some security settings in Internet Explorer or installing a third-party add-on in Firefox—and it's a one-time thing.

Mighty Text's Power view displays phone-sized fields on your PC, which display recent messages in conversation form.

MightyText's Web app is slick, and it lets you choose between a "classic view" and a "power view." The classic view uses a layout similar to Microsoft Outlook, where you see information about the sender in the first column and then message details in the next column. The power view, meanwhile, displays phone-sized fields on your computer screen that display recent text messages in conversation form. The power view lets you see more messages at once (it fit eight on my screen), while the classic view gives you more space for viewing message details. Switching between them is easy.

To send a message, you click the new message button, and a small window for composing it pops up in the lower right corner of the screen, reminiscent of how Google's Gmail works. And, much like Gmail, MightyText also puts a message composition window at the bottom of the conversations you view, making it easy to send a reply message.

MightyText lets you mark favorite messages, browse through contacts, and easily adjust the settings (which include whether pressing enter should or should not send your messages and whether you want to get pop ups to notify you of new messages and calls). It also displays your phone's battery life and notifies you of incoming and missed calls via pop-ups.

Mightytext's classic view uses a column-style layout, similar to Microsoft Outlook.

MightyText is slick, seamless, and—best of all—free. It's my desktop app of choice for my Android phone.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

How to Use Your HTC One as a Remote Control

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From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

iExplorer Puts You in Control of Your iOS Device

iTunes is a good way to manage your iOS mobile devices, but it's not without its limitations. Chief among those limits is how iTunes operates in its own closed environment, behind closed doors. Enter Macroplant's iExplorer 3 ($35, free feature-limited demo). This software works both with and instead of iTunes, offering you more freedom in how you manage the contents of your iPhone, iPod, or iPad from your PC.

iExplorer's main screen shows you detailed information about the contents of your iOS device.To use iExplorer, you simply download it and connect your iOS device to your PC. It reads the contents of your device, and presents the information to you in a neatly organized dashboard. Much like iTunes, iExplorer shows you information about your iPhone or iPad, such as its software version, serial number, and capacity.. You also can browse its apps, photos, music, and videos, just as you can with iTunes. But iExplorer lets you do even more, including browsing its messages, notes, contacts, voicemails, bookmarks, calendar, call history, and so on.

And iExplorer lets you do even more than browse the contents of the device; it also lets you transfer it to your phone. (iExplorer is available in a free, but limited version, which restricts how much information you can transfer from your device to your computer at a time. Paying $35 for a registered version removes those limits.) You can use the Auto Transfer feature to send selected content (including individual files, multiple files, playlists, and more) to iTunes, or you can use the Transfer feature to move content from the iOS device to folders on the computer, using the Windows Explorer interface. You also can use iExplorer to mount a directory from your iOS device as a folder in Windows Explorer, which makes it even easier to liberate iTunes-bought content from the iTunes universe.

You also can use iExplorer to save information from your phone, including text messages, call logs, and more. You can export the information to .csv or .txt file, and you can create backups of specific information or you entire phone.

In a lot of ways, iExplorer is what iTunes should be. But if you're comfortable with iTunes, don't worry; you don't have to abandon it to use iExplorer. Both programs together will offer you a complete way to manage your iOS device.

—Liane Cassavoy

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Control Your Music With the Palm of Your Hand Using Flutter

Anyone who grew up watching the Star Wars movies knows how cool it looked to be a Jedi and control things with a simple movement of the hand. For a long time, it seemed as if this would remain firmly in the realm of science fiction along with lightsabers. Now a new app that relies on hand gestures is available for controlling your music. Called Flutter, this free Windows software lets you start and stop your music simply by showing the flat palm of your hand to your webcam.

You need to use either iTunes, Spotify, Winamp, or Windows Media Player for your music playing. Anything else, such as Miro or Zune, is not currently supported.

Starting and stopping the music is at present the only thing Flutter can do, so look upon this as simply proof that the concept works. Apparently, according to the company website, next up in the pipeline is a beta version (currently for Mac OS X only) that allows you to change music tracks, simply by swiping your hand in front of the webcam. I'm sure they are also working on a version that increases and decreases the volume (at least, I hope so).

The pros to Flutter are ones that will appeal to efficiency freaks. If you're sitting in front of your computer typing away, and you want to change the track on iTunes, then you would have to stop typing, look for the mouse, find iTunes, then the track…that all takes time. But with Flutter, when you want to change tracks, you just stop typing, hold up a hand in front of the webcam, then go back to typing as the Rolling Stones track flips from not getting any satisfaction to singing about Angie. There's no need to click the mouse or to search for tracks. Your webcam and Flutter do it all for you.

Flutter has cons, though. Throughout the few weeks I tested this app, sudden hand movements at times started my Spotify desktop app. Supposedly Flutter should start Spotify only when I show my flat palm to the webcam, but I've had Spotify starting when I scratched my ear or swatted a fly away from my head. In subsequent tests, I failed to recreate this problem, so maybe it was just a temporary glitch. Nevertheless, when you have Flutter on, you should be cautious with your movements in front of the webcam. Plus, until the next version comes out, Flutter has only one function.

Despite these limitations, if you are a music fan who uses one of the supported music players, Flutter is a great app that gives you a glimpse into the future of what is coming and what is possible.

—Mark O'Neill

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iExplorer Puts You in Control of Your iOS Device

iTunes is a good way to manage your iOS mobile devices, but it's not without its limitations. Chief among those limits is how iTunes operates in its own closed environment, behind closed doors. Enter Macroplant's iExplorer 3 ($35, free feature-limited demo). This software works both with and instead of iTunes, offering you more freedom in how you manage the contents of your iPhone, iPod, or iPad from your PC.

iExplorer's main screen shows you detailed information about the contents of your iOS device.To use iExplorer, you simply download it and connect your iOS device to your PC. It reads the contents of your device, and presents the information to you in a neatly organized dashboard. Much like iTunes, iExplorer shows you information about your iPhone or iPad, such as its software version, serial number, and capacity.. You also can browse its apps, photos, music, and videos, just as you can with iTunes. But iExplorer lets you do even more, including browsing its messages, notes, contacts, voicemails, bookmarks, calendar, call history, and so on.

And iExplorer lets you do even more than browse the contents of the device; it also lets you transfer it to your phone. (iExplorer is available in a free, but limited version, which restricts how much information you can transfer from your device to your computer at a time. Paying $35 for a registered version removes those limits.) You can use the Auto Transfer feature to send selected content (including individual files, multiple files, playlists, and more) to iTunes, or you can use the Transfer feature to move content from the iOS device to folders on the computer, using the Windows Explorer interface. You also can use iExplorer to mount a directory from your iOS device as a folder in Windows Explorer, which makes it even easier to liberate iTunes-bought content from the iTunes universe.

You also can use iExplorer to save information from your phone, including text messages, call logs, and more. You can export the information to .csv or .txt file, and you can create backups of specific information or you entire phone.

In a lot of ways, iExplorer is what iTunes should be. But if you're comfortable with iTunes, don't worry; you don't have to abandon it to use iExplorer. Both programs together will offer you a complete way to manage your iOS device.

—Liane Cassavoy

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Program Your Mouse With X-Mouse Button Control

Most computer users do most of their clicking on the left side of the mouse. Many make good use of the right button as well. And a handful leverage the middle button.

X-Mouse Button Control gives you many different ways to use your mouse.

Middle button? I'm sure some of you are thinking, "My mouse doesn't have a middle button, just a scroll wheel." That wheel doubles as a button. If you don't believe me, just click it. (This is true on most mice, though there might be a few older models on which the wheel is just a wheel.)

As some of you know, you can click and hold that button, then move your mouse back and forth to scroll up and down in your Web browser. But for those who don't like that option, or just want more versatility from their mouse, allow me to introduce X-Mouse Button Control.

True to its name, this free utility affords considerable control over your mouse's buttons. I'm going to focus solely on the middle one--but once you learn to tweak that, you should have no trouble modifying your mouse's other buttons.

Once installed, X-Mouse intercepts clicks of any given button and performs a selected task. For example, you can program the middle button to go back a page in your browser; close the current window; cut or copy selected text; activate Windows 7's Flip 3D mode; lock your workstation; maximize the current window; and so on.

My favorite use for the middle mouse button: double-click. In other words, instead of having to manually double-click a desktop icon to launch a program or open a document, I just middle-click it. Once you've made your selection from the drop-down list, simply click Apply to make it start working immediately.

This is really a handy utility, almost on par with my all-time favorite tool, WizMouse. If your middle mouse button is sitting idly by while your other buttons work overtime, I definitely recommend giving X-Mouse a try.

--Rick Broida

You are able to provide application or window specific mappings, which means an application or window can use the mouse buttons differently from another. For each profile you can optionally define up to 5 'layers' of different button configurations which you can switch between using hotkeys or mouse buttons.

You can also alter the behaviour of the scroll and tilt wheel functions, fixing windows that don't normally respond to these controls.

Profiles are automatically activated by moving the mouse over the defined window or alternatively, when the specified application is active. This has many uses, for example:
In games which do not natively support the extended mouse buttons, you can map keys to each button.
Changing the behaviour of the mouse over certain windows, such as making the mouse wheel change volume when hovering over the system tray.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Free Image Editor MAGIX Photo Designer 7 Gives You Pixel-by-Pixel Control

It's hard to know what to expect from a free image editor. After all, if all was fair, we'd be getting Photoshop minus about $700 worth of features. But many free editors, MAGIX Photo Designer included, have great strengths that serve a niche, and make them invaluable: If they do what you need them to.

Although Photo Designer's selection of preset art filters is very complete, they all seem to result in an uncannily similar effect.As a lover of Xara products, I was really excited to try out Magix Photo Designer 7, billed as the free version of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer ($89). But the products are so different they are barely recognizable as even half-sisters, and few of the features I love about Xara are in Photo Designer's gene pool.

Photo Designer's red-eye reduction tool worked very well on the image I tested. Unlike the step-up versions, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7 or Xara Designer Pro ($299), Photo Designer creates an iris-sized stamp that you use with one or two clicks to gray over the red-eye parts of your images. I found it to be just as effective as the gray dot you need to somewhat accurately draw using the more expensive versions--and it's certainly easier to get the hang of.

I also preferred Photo Designer's Clone Tool over the Xara software. Photo Designer's version works more like Photoshop in that you chose the clone and then paint over the area you want to replace. It's simple and a lot more effective than the new Xara method.

These were the only features of Photo Designer that really impressed me, however. Like other Xara photo editors (and high-end products like $700 Adobe Photoshop), Photo Designer has the tools to select groups of pixels and make changes specifically to the selection. The tool is an exciting addition, but its effectiveness depends greatly on the Photo Designer brush you have selected, and there's not much in the way of help: Rather, you're left to experiment. If your experimentation goes well, however, expect to be able to apply blur, fill, brightness, and color adjustments to selected pixels within your image.

Photo Designer includes fewer features than GIMP (a free, open source image editor), which makes it less intimidating. And much like Serif's PhotoPlus X5 ($89), Photo Designer includes a Task Assistant, which takes you step-by-step through common tasks like creating panoramic images, isolating parts of your image, and optimizing colors. PhotoPlus X5's version is much more detailed, however, and although it's a nice feature in Photo Designer, it oftentimes left me wanting help with the next step.

Photo Designer includes a number of interesting presets to turn your image into a painting, drawing, or other style of artwork. These filters worked relatively quickly, but not very well, and certainly nowhere near with the same finesse as FotoSketcher, a free tool that excels at turning images into fine art. I found myself adjusting the settings manually to differentiate Photo Designer's preset effects from one another.

If you're looking for a free image editor to manipulate specific parts of your images---down to a pixel by pixel level of detail---or make quick changes, Photo Designer 7 may be a good fit for you. It's a little clunky and unpredictable, especially compared to sister product Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, but the ability to 'Shop images for free is worth the tradeoff.

--Clare Brandt

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Control Your Music With a Wave of Your Hand: Flutter Hands-On

Music players such as iTunes and Spotify have gone through numerous updates to make the user experience as pleasant and seamless as possible. Hotkeys and key combinations exist for just about every function in these programs — one of the most obvious being the spacebar for playing and pausing music. A limitation of using the spacebar to start and stop your music, however, is the fact that you must be in the app for the hotkey to work. Enter Flutter, a new app that allows users to play and pause their music just by holding their palms up to the webcam. While it’s still in alpha, Flutter already shows lots of promise. We went hands-on with the app to see for ourselves how well it works.

Installing the app is easy. Just head to Flutter’s website and click on the large “download” button at the top of the screen. This will take you to a page asking for your email address and whether or not you’d like to be kept up-to-date on program’s the development progress. Once you’ve finished downloading the app, just follow the installation instructions.

After you’ve installed Flutter, a very brief tutorial explains how the app works:

Using Flutter is as intuitive as it seems: Simply hold up your hand to the webcam to start or stop your music. Impressively, the app responds immediately — we didn’t notice any delay when pausing or playing. Flutter recognizes the palm of your hand easily enough, so we decided to test the limits of its hand-recognition:

When displaying our hand palm-out, the app responded immediately.

Not surprisingly, the app didn’t recognize our hand when we used just one finger.

Switching to two fingers, however, caused the app to work correctly (about half of the time).

To our surprise, displaying our hand palm-in caused the app to work correctly, with immediate responsiveness. 

Overall, Flutter is a neat little app that makes listening to music on iTunes or Spotify that much easier while multitasking. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates the potential of using laptops’ built-in webcams for a host of gesture-based controls. A future in which laptop users barely need to touch their keys doesn’t seem so far away.

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DigitalVolcano's Duplicate Cleaner Pro Helps You Regain Space and Control

No matter how big hard drives get, they always seem to fill up too quickly. This isn't due just to ever-increasing media file size; it also happens because the same files are often stored multiple times. When moving document folders around, downloading information, or making backups, it's easy to end up with many copies of the same file, sometimes with different names. Duplicate Cleaner Pro ($40, 15-day trial with limitations) is a utility that helps locate such files.

Duplicate Cleaner helps find, and clean, the clutter that any large hard drive accumulates.Duplicate file finders, in general, are nothing new. Many general-purpose disk utility sets, such as Captain Optimizer or Perfect Disk, include this function, but because it's often a secondary or sideline aspect, it can be underdeveloped. DigitalVolcano's Duplicate Cleaner has no other purpose, and thus a high degree of functionality is expected--and in this case, delivered.

You can set Duplicate Cleaner to search specific directories, and filter types of files looked for, using either the preset file types, or your own, or simply "all files". You can compare contents to within a degree of similarity, with the default being 95%, and set upper and lower bounds of file sizes to be included. This last feature requires sizes be specified in kilobytes, making it slightly unwieldy to specify boundaries in today's more common megabytes or gigabytes.

The time it takes to search depends on the size of your hard disk and the narrowness of your filters, but if you have enough files to make a tool like Duplicate Cleaner worthwhile in the first place, it's probably a good idea to start the search in the evening and review the results in the morning. You can stop the process, but doing so will cause you to lose progress on the search and have to restart it. The results will be initially shown as groups of identical files, but it is also possible to sort them by path, name, or size, which can make finding the ones you most want to delete much easier. You can perform multiple selections on the list, open directories, or launch the files. There is also a second list of the folders which contain duplicate groups, so you can delete an entire redundant folder in one go.

Only rarely did Duplicate Cleaner not work as expected. It was not instantly clear how to restore groups after sorting by name. (You need to show the "Group" column, then sort by it.) I found it odd that you can't select more than one folder at a time from the folder listing. These are minor criticisms.

The trial/demo version of Duplicate Cleaner allows you to delete files in only the first hundred groups found, and does not allow you to load or save lists of duplicate files. The 15-day time limit should be sufficient to determine if Duplicate Cleaner will be useful to you.

At $40, Duplicate Cleaner is nearing the top of the cost curve for a single-function utility. However, it can be a tremendous help in cleaning the useless clutter from your hard disk, which consumes not only inexpensive disk space, but expensive time and attention as it bloats indexes and slows search results.

--Ian Harac

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Showdown: Remote Control Tech Support Services, Tested

At some point, calling your tech-savvy friends and relatives for help gets old. Or rather, they stop answering the phone, and you’re left on your own to figure out why your Wi-Fi doesn’t work.

Designed for novices and businesses without access to on-site tech support, a new and growing breed of tech support services are ready to lend a hand. Using remote-control software, these services can troubleshoot your PC while you kick back and finish your latte--provided your Internet connection isn’t the problem. And the best part is that you no longer have to cart your computer into a shop or even walk through a fix on the phone.

We put four remote-control tech support services to the test, peppering them with three problems that we (intentionally) created on a test PC, a Samsung Series 7 Chronos laptop running Windows 7. We tested during different times of the day, but always during business hours, one problem per call. To make things tougher, we disabled System Restore, eliminating the option of an easy fix for some of these problems. (Techs are often quick to jump to this fix--after blaming viruses--as a cure-all.)

Click to see the full comparison of remote tech-support services.The Tests

We designed three tests to mimic common complaints that we've heard over the years.

Test 1: We deleted the driver for our audio subsystem, and told the tech support rep that we couldn’t hear anything during Skype calls. (The correct fix: Reinstall the driver.)

Test 2: A simple one: We changed the resolution on our display so that icons and text looked radically stretched out. We said "our kids" had messed up our PC. (The correct fix: Change resolution in the Display control panel.)

Test 3: We deleted the “Users” folder from the Windows Indexing service and said that when we searched, our personal files were no longer showing up in Start Menu search results. (The correct fix: Add the “Users” folder back to the index, then rebuild the index.)

Here’s how four remote tech-support operations fared when faced with running our gauntlet of tech problems.

Price: $170/year

iYogi, as the name implies, is an India-based outfit, even offering "Good Karma!" with its automated tune-up system. The website is garish--particularly around Valentine’s Day, when floating pink hearts obscure the checkout button--which may give you pause when forking over $170 for a year.

Once you’ve registered, iYogi directs you to install the iYogi Support Dock, a lengthy, multistep process that eventually gives you a widget that always resides at the top of your screen and includes a button to click for help.

Test 1: In the missing sound test, our support rep arrived to chat after a couple of minutes and asked if we had driver discs for our computer. We didn’t (who does?). But he correctly went to the Device Manager to spot the missing devices anyway, reinstalling them there directly. The fix took only a few minutes.

However, the tech ended with a spiel on iYogi’s other support options. And we were a little annoyed by a follow-up phone call a half-hour later, attempting to sell us on a second year of support. A second call from the iYogi telephone number came 10 minutes later, but no one was on the line. Rating: 8 (out of 10)

iYogi uses a widget that sits on your desktop.

Test 2: We began with a wait of a little under 3 minutes. Fixing the display resolution should have been easy, taking only a few seconds, but our tech rep poked around in the ATI Catalyst control panel and even ran through the ClearType Tuner wizard to try to fix it. And he blew it when he was warned by ClearType that the screen’s native resolution wasn’t enabled, skipping past it and asking us, in the end, “Are [the icons] okay now?” We said no, and eventually he dug back in, finally correcting the resolution. Total time elapsed on a 30-second fix: 20 minutes. Rating: 4

Test 3: Our indexing issue began ominously with the technician boldly informing us that the Windows Start menu can’t find user files. We insisted that this worked on our office PC, and he proceeded to dig into the Start Menu properties. There he enabled the "Search without public folders" option. This doesn’t actually add user files to the index, but it did put user files into search results, through a sort of back door. This worked well enough on our test computer, but as we had a much larger user folder than is on most PCs, searching would have been terribly slow. We complained that results were showing up slowly, but the tech considered the case closed and ended the session. Time elapsed: about 10 minutes. Rating: 4

Overall, iYogi’s technicians did not appear especially talented at solving Windows issues, but they eventually stumbled upon solutions more often than not.

Final Rating: 5

Price: $89/session or $170/year

HiWired offers per-session repair services, but for more than one problem, you’re better off going with the yearly plan. Unfortunately, HiWired’s online checkout system wouldn’t let us register over the Web, and we had to give our credit card information over the phone. We were also baffled when a technician said that we couldn't get a receipt. Despite these red flags, we plowed ahead.

HiWired has its own tech support application called PC Check & Connect, but this did not work until our third round with tech support, at which point they fixed their own app. For the first two rounds, HiWired used LogMeIn Rescue sessions to control our PC, after we called in via phone.

Test 1: After a brief hold, the technician went to the Device Manager and saw the missing drivers, but instead of adding them through Windows, he used a browser to go the manufacturer’s website to try to download drivers for our machine. He asked what model our PC was and we twiddled our thumbs as he tried to find audio drivers online. Eventually he realized that the standard audio drivers included with Windows just needed to be reinstalled. He spent a long time trying to troubleshoot the PC Check & Connect software to no avail, citing a compatibility problem with Windows 7 and Internet Explorer. A lengthy 40 minutes later, we had sound, but still no support app. Rating: 3

Test 2: Our screen resolution repair went smoothly, with the same rep as the previous day. We spent 3 minutes on hold, yet he immediately saw the problem after launching LogMeIn Rescue, fixing it right away. Rating: 9

HiWired's own app didn't work on our PC.

Test 3: This ordeal would have made Sisyphus break down in tears. We were connected via phone to a new technician, who began troubleshooting by creating a dummy text file and verifying the search system couldn’t find it. He said it was an indexing problem, but proceeded to check if the Windows Search service was running, confusing the two (related) issues. When this looked okay, he said he would “check the files” over the next few hours, but did nothing for 40 minutes.

He finally opened, then rebuilt, the index, failing to notice that the Users folder wasn’t showing up there. We still had no fix, and two hours later we were transferred to another technician. He spent several hours installing and running a battery of antispyware apps and testing the speed of our Internet connection. We didn’t have a clue what was going on until hours later, when he declared that “AVG Antivirus was the issue,” and that the problem was “fixed.” He signed off.

We later learned that the new tech was mistakenly told we had a virus. We reexplained the problem, and the tech said he would run some Windows updates and Check Disk. This would take quite a while, he said, so we left the PC on throughout the evening. Eight hours later, another virus scan was running, which we left going overnight. Come morning, the session had expired and the computer had clearly been abandoned with the antivirus app still on-screen.

We reconnected, getting a third technician with an aggravating penchant for attempting to control our PC while we were explaining our issue in the chat window. She blamed the prior tech for misunderstanding the problem. Her lengthy session ranged from checking running services to editing the Registry (seriously) to downloading Windows hotfixes.

She did eventually update the index, but added the entire C and D drives to it instead of just the Users folder. This created a new problem because the index would clearly take hours to rebuild. When results weren’t immediately evident, she restarted the index rebuilding process several times, rebooted into Safe Mode, and ran the Windows System File Checker. Two hours into this session, the problem was finally--mercifully--resolved. Time elapsed: 22 hours. Rating: 1

For the most part, we got the distinct impression that HiWired’s technicians had little idea of what they were doing. The final incident alone was horrifying.

Final Rating: 2

Next: Geek Squad, Support.com

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