After experiencing regular error messages when I shut down my laptop, I entered 
the dark and lonely world of online "help desks" by Dell, McAfee, Microsoft, and Palm. Not that there weren't pleasant moments -- these services are largely customer-focused and easily accessible, in most cases 24x7, since The World Is Flat
your computer and try to fix it. But the bad news is that the customer is still required to be the integrator of the information, and as a recovering technophobe, that was really unacceptable to me. My lessons learned cost me much of 5 days of work or aggravatioin and extra $$ for fee-based support.
But I have lived to tell about it, and, most importantly, the unwanted crash course in tech support forced me to become more knowledgeable as an end-user and a lot smarter as a consumer. Perhaps this advice will help you.
Like most of us, I'm totally technology dependent. My laptop and my cell phone constitute my office, and though I haven't opted for all the whiz-bang options, I have a full plate of services that wire me for business.
We all know that computers and software aren't intuitive, instead constructed in a linear step by step fashion. Apparently so are the help-desk folks, who follow documented protocols to fix problems by "live online chats" or email support. Thus they resemble machines themselves and rarely, in my experience, had enough confidence to step back and apply some human logic.
In the end, when I was totally and irretrievably lost in the technology tunnel, 
I was the one who found my way out. I applied the logic, determining that I was sent down the wrong pathway early in the process by a support agent who either couldn't read well or didn't listen well, thus setting into motion a series of wrong protocols and steps -- resulting in my having to run a few thousand virus scans, reload Windows after copying all my files, and reload all my software.
I concluded (rightly) that I was told (wrongly) that I had a computer virus by a Dell support person, when actually the letters and numbers in the error code indicated a McAfee Spamkiller error. But you 
can't get the Dell person and the McAfee person on the phone together to sort this out. In fact, it's hard to get real voices on the phone -- that costs an extra $35 bucks and up.
Whatever happened to being able to get someone on the phone (for free)??? It would been so much more efficient! Instead, I had to direct an orchestra -- woodwinds, percussion, and strings -- as an amateur conductor without a score. Hardware here, software there. We don't support this. We only support that. You have to call blah-blah for that. Ya de ya de ya. I became the integrator of all the information -- finally connecting a series of parallel tracks into a solution.
I learned too late in the process about the Geek Squad because I'd fixed things by then. But I'll definitely use them the next time, as we actually had live voice contact -- and the sound was so sweet.
