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As technical support representative for an Internet service provider, Virginia Gudgel of Sacramento, California, easily handled countless phone calls with cool, professional composure.

But when her employer, MCI Internet, laid out stringent rules for handling customer support calls, even the unflappable Gudgel was taken aback. "We were supposed to get calls done in 5 minutes," she recalls. "It already takes 2 minutes for a customer to describe what's wrong. If technicians are trying to get a person off the phone so they can keep their call volume down, well, that's not doing the customer any good." (MCI's Internet business was later acquired by Cable & Wireless, which instituted a new policy on support calls: Stay on the phone until the customer's issue is resolved.)

Gudgel's story may sound familiar if you've ever called tech support. Your PC, printer, or Internet connection unexpectedly goes south, and you waste half an hour listening to Barry Manilow's greatest hits, only to be rushed off the phone by a tech who hasn't solved your problem.

In extreme cases, it may take hours to reach a living, breathing customer support rep. Laurie Gibb, an information technology manager from Virginia, waited on hold repeatedly, sometimes for as long as 2 hours, trying to get Dell's tech support reps to troubleshoot her PC's hard drive. She phoned Dell ten times--and spoke with a different person during each call--before her issue was resolved. Dell spokesperson Anne Miano says, "two-hour waits usually don't happen; [the average hold time is] much shorter."

Service nightmares like Gibb's make it seem as if technical support is getting worse. That's not quite the case, according to historical data from our Reliability and Service surveys, based on periodic polls of approximately 10,000 PC World readers over several years. Our readers' responses to many of the questions about their tech support experiences didn't change much between 1998 and last year.

Still, PC vendors' support teams are clearly slipping in some areas. The most significant is in the number of customers who never obtained a satisfactory solution to their computer problems. In 1998, 6.6 percent of home PC users said their problem was never resolved. By 2000, that figure had climbed to 8.3 percent. Among notebook users, the number jumped from 5 percent to 7.9 percent. And over the same time period, the proportion of home PC users who were very satisfied with the service they received plummeted from 62 percent in 1998 to just 49 percent in 2000.

What about the support offered by other technology vendors? Since our surveys cover only PC companies, we placed three calls each to two ISPs, two printer manufacturers, and two software vendors to evaluate their services. Our best experiences were with printer makers HP and Lexmark, whose techs generally picked up the phone within 5 minutes and provided accurate answers to our questions. Our calls to ISPs EarthLink and Pacific Bell weren't as pleasing. Our shortest wait for an EarthLink representative was 12 minutes, and the longest dragged on for more than a half-hour. Pacific Bell's techs picked up sooner but weren't very helpful.

When it comes to software support, you'd better have your wallet handy. Both Microsoft and Symantec, maker of the popular Norton AntiVirus program, often charge for support. For Windows and Office, for example, Microsoft allows users two free calls or e-mail inquiries (or one of each) to tech support. After that, one query costs a stiff $35. Norton AntiVirus users can choose to pay either $30 per consultation or $3 per minute. If you correspond via e-mail, there's no charge. (Symantec promises to respond by the next business day.)

One of the best ways to avoid the high cost of fee-based technical support--or the long waits and occasional aggravation of free support--is to solve the problem yourself. We've assembled 50 tips, techniques, and resources that may provide solutions faster and easier than your vendor's support staff can (see "The Tech Support Survival Guide").