Web Worker Daily

If you work alone or with a small group, you may very well have no IT person to turn to when you need help. Fortunately, the web is a good, although not perfect, medium for getting technical support. You can do so for free, and in this post I’ll cover some of the best resources that you can take advantage of.

For speedy answers to technical questions, I haven’t found any better resource than Protonic.com. It’s an online community run by volunteers, and answers to your questions are completely free. As you can see above, the site touts over 160,000 questions as having been answered. The volunteers on the site will refer to you as a client even though you’re not paying them any fee. You can get good answers to questions about PCs, Windows, Macs, the Mac OS, Palm devices and applications, HTML and more.

As with most free tech support offerings, getting an answer can sometimes take a day, but I have gotten answers from Protonic back within an hour before. The volunteers are surprisingly tech savvy, and are often specialists. For example, I have asked several questions about HTML and CSS to Protonic volunteers and not only gotten complete answers but on a couple of occasions, I’ve even sent an excerpt of problematic HTML code and had a Protonic volunteer send me back a correctly coded version. When this happens to you, you will feel just like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence.

Two services similar to Protonic that you may want to try are Tech Support Guy and AskMeHelpDesk  (although AskMeHelpDesk is for getting answers on more topics than just technology, it has many technology specialists available). In some instances, I have asked the same question on all three of these services and gotten multiple answers back within an hour.

If you have a very general type of technology question and would just like to get a concensus, try Circle Up, which has been covered on this blog before. And, you can even get reasonably good concensus opinions on general topics through Yahoo! Answers.

If you are considering biting the bullet and paying a little bit for technical support, or you’re simply willing to pay on a one-time basis for help with a particular task, there are unusual services that may fit your needs. At Geeks In A Flash! you can buy low-priced technical support packages ranging from Bronze service (throughout the workday) to Gold service (24/7 support). And, if you need someone to come to your home and solve a technical problem, Geek Squad is a good place to turn, and they probably have squad members near you.

Do you have any tips on free or inexpensive tech support?