Congratulations go to Geoffrey Lamble for winning the free copy of Master Of The Empire in our prize drawing! His winning entry was picked on the 14^th and we'll be shipping his copy of the new OS/2 game to him soon.

Where do you usually go to get support now?

When problems rear their ugly head, where's the first place you go to get technical support? In our last survey we decided to take the opportunity to coincide the topic with Trevor Smith's article on Guerrilla Tech Support.

For this survey we had 1,304 valid votes. A vote is considered valid if it answers all the questions, has an e-mail address, and is not a duplicate.

Since IBM now charges for answering support questions beyond the first 90-days, most users have found it's far cheaper to go elsewhere when questions need answering. Over 37% of you voted, not surprisingly, for the web as your first port of call. The next most popular was Usenet - where not only is there a huge cache of information already available, but new questions are quickly answered too. A very tiny number of people got their support from their PC maker, company help desk or third party support company.

We did have a number of readers who wrote in to say that we forgot to put in one important option: Listservs, or mailing list support groups such as OS/2-L.

By what means would you prefer to get support?

We also asked what means you'd prefer to get support by, if it were possible for you to get it that way. Most (53%) seemed to favor a web knowledge base, presumably where they could search an online database for quick answers to their questions. E-mail (21.7%) and phone (13.6%) were the next most popular, with the idea of on-site consultants having limited appeal.

Complete November 1^st Survey Results

Where's the first place you go to find support now?

Category	Count	Percentage
IBM	89	6.8%
Your PC manufacturer	3	0.2%
Your company's help desk	8	0.6%
Local user group	94	7.2%
Usenet (Newsgroups)	433	33.2%
The Web	487	37.3%
Internet Relay Chat (IRC)	70	5.4%
Paid third-party support	4	0.3%
Other	115	8.8%
TOTAL	1,304	99.8%

By what means would you prefer to get technical support?

Category	Count	Percentage
By phone (toll free or otherwise)	177	13.6%
By a web knowledge base site	697	53.5%
By e-mail	283	21.7%
By on-site consultants	21	1.6%
By real-time internet chat	74	5.7%
Other	50	3.8%
I do not understand the question	1	0.1%
TOTAL	1,304	100.0%