Microsoft Offers Free Support for Vista SP1

March 24th, 2008 | Category: Tech Talk

There have been decent problems with the Service Pack 1 update for Windows Vista that Microsoft is offering free tech support to anyone having problems, company representatives said on the official Vista blog.

A new SP1-specific support site says the free, unlimited support is available until March 18, 2009. The site offers e-mail, chat and phone support. As of that writing, the site was reporting one-day delays for e-mail responses and an 18-minute delay for chat responses.

The hours for chat are 5 a.m. to midnight Pacific instance weekdays and 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends. Phone support, at (866) 234-6020 is 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays and 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekends.

University Says No

The free support is apparently a response to widespread problems users have experienced in installing SP1. And just as with adoption of Vista itself, some enterprises are showing resistance to installing the major update.

The University of Pennsylvania is advising

faculty and staff not to install SP1. The school’s IT division said it will support Vista SP1 when it comes preinstalled on new systems, but “strongly recommends that all other users adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude” toward updating, according to a university bulletin Friday.

Penn users should continue “to use previous versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista until after the initial bugs in SP1 are identified and fixed,” the area said.

Widespread Problems

Meanwhile, Vista users are angrily reporting on Microsoft blogs about problems related to the update.

Writing on the Windows Vista Team Blog, Richard Ingram questioned the quality of Microsoft’s support. “One problem of going through the e-mail support is that when you receive a response from the e-mail support and try to reply to the e-mail — you can’t, as no e-mail address appears in the To: box,” he said. “I managed to get hold…

Orginal post by Computer blog from technology-blog.com

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