Now that’s support

With all the tech support horror stories out there, I thought I’d pass along a good story for a change.

At a trade show last year, I picked up a StarTech mini-KVM switch from a vendor. Yesterday I decided to break it out so I could link a desktop machine I use for editing/encoding to my laptop docking station’s keyboard, mouse and monitor (my laptop alone is powerful enough, but it’s nice to offload mundane processing to another machine). Well, I ran into a problem with the video display coming off the laptop after the switch was in place. Things didn’t look promising when I went to StarTech’s knowledge base search page and it was down. So, I tried the 800 number that was on a reminder sticker that came with the product. When I went into the hold queue I didn’t have high hopes, but the tech support guy who answered (I’m sorry I didn’t catch his name) was super helpful, even staying on the line for 30 minutes while we went through a number of troubleshooting items and system reboots. Finally, it worked! (Still evaluating the effectiveness of the KVM switch itself, but it’s working properly.)