PC Support: For Want Of A Simple Sticker, The Profit Was Lost

I had an interesting, and initially baffling, email exchange with my friend Lisa and her husband Paul over the weekend. After six years of regular use, Lisa’s trusty PC quit delivering video to its tethered (VGA, I assume, given the gears’ age) monitor. Paul ordered her a brand new quad-core Acer system from TigerDirect, but when it arrived, it also refused to wake up the monitor. Her monitor would work fine with Paul’s system, but Paul’s display didn’t work with her new computer, either.

What was going on? It was difficult for me to sort out the variables (and therefore the potential culprits) exclusively via brief (and somewhat cryptical) emails, but before I could get over to their place to do onsite debugging, Paul returned home from work and sorted out the situation. Her system came by default with core logic chipset-integrated graphics, but Acer had performance-upgraded the box with a standalone PCI Express slot-populated graphics card.

Can you guess what perfectly understandable and (I suspect) common hookup snafu Lisa had made? She mated the display to the integrated graphics connector, not to the output of the standalone graphics card. Apparently, the system BIOS automatically disables integrated graphics in the presence of an add-in card, or perhaps Acer had explicitly configured this setting as part of the system manufacturing flow. But the company forgot to stick a simple ‘do not use’ label on the integrated graphics port. And, as a result, poor Lisa was mighty perplexed.

This kind of situation, I confess, drives me bonkers. Profit margins are slim as it is in the PC (or for that matter any consumer electronics) business. As such, the costs incurred by an OEM resulting from a single technical support phone call are often enough to make a system sale unprofitable, far from the more formidable retailer (therefore OEM) expense incurred by a consumer’s system-return-to-store. Lisa’s highly intelligent albeit (as is the case with most folks) not particularly technical, though it’s interesting to note that she quickly mastered her Apple iPhone. Nor should she need to be particularly technical in order to hook up and use her new PC. In that respect, I agree with my boss (and no, not just because he’s my boss); it’s the manufacturers that are stupid, not the consumers.

I don’t know if she read the system’s instruction manual (which was probably a PDF on a CD, not a bound-paper document), but I do know that she pored over the FAQ on Acer’s website, and it didn’t help. Again, for something this basic, she shouldn’t need to rely on elaborate documentation (which most folks won’t even bother reading); a simple sticker would have sufficed. Consumer electronics manufacturers, stop making ridiculous assumptions as to your customers’ expertise, and of their available time and willingness to spend it debugging their purchases from you. The path many of you are currently on is one that’s not fiscally sustainable.