Digital plumbers enter the home

By Mark Ward
Technology correspondent, BBC News

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Engineer Dennis Talbot suspects a manufacturer's error caused Dupe Dumsanhi's laptop to be silent.

The day with BT's Home IT Visit service began in the London borough of Plumstead at an address so new it did not appear on the satellite navigation system.

But it was only a problem for the BBC. As we struggled with technology, Dennis Talbot, the BT engineer who we shadowed for the day, got there using mapbooks and an old-fashioned A-Z.

Dennis knows his way around because, like many of BT Home Visit's engineers, he covers a huge area. Most of the South East in fact. His catchment area includes Portsmouth, East London, Southampton and most of Kent.

Sound advice

On a busy day he can criss-cross that area several times.

"Some days two jobs can take all day, sometimes you have do four to five in a day," he said. "It depends on every job. Some can take an hour, some take longer."

"Sometimes it is all about waiting," he said.

So it proved with the first visit. The patient was a Dell Inspiron 150L laptop running Vista that had lost its audio.

BT HOME IT VISIT - THE FACTS BT Home IT Visit was established in September 2006 and followed the launch in March 2006 of BT's phone-based PC help service - known as BT Home IT Call. The Home Visit service is available between 08:00 and 18:00 on weekdays. For an additional fee (£20) a visit can be arranged after 1800 or on Saturdays. Home IT Visit can call on 800 engineers and claims to have done more than 100,000 visits during its 18 month life. Visits can be booked over the phone or via the internet and a next day service is available. Engineers will install wireless networks, unbox and set-up new PCs or do a health check on a computer. Wireless installs, health checks and general help cost £90. Setting up a computer costs £120. Giving additional help beyond resolving the initial query costs £30 per half hour.

A look at the task bar in the bottom right showed no speaker and a check revealed no audio device was installed.

Which was odd given that the machine was only a few months old.

Dennis tried disabling the device then re-enabling it.

"The software is on the computer," he said, "It should re-install itself automatically."

But it didn't.

The next step was to return the laptop to a former state in which the audio was working.

System Restore, the option Dennis chose, keeps data files such as images and video intact but rolls back those internal settings to an earlier time.

Restore points are created when the machine is updated, new software is installed or an owner sets one up.

Strangely the machine had no restore points before March 19 - about four weeks prior to Dennis' visit.

As the laptop chuntered away rolling its internals back to that date, Dennis chatted to the customer - Dumsanhi Dupe - and found out that she had already tried most of the tricks he was employing.

Ms Dupe said she had been on the Dell website and had come across a discussion about a fault with the model of laptop she owned that knocked out the audio.

"In that case," said Dennis, "it sounds like a design fault."

System restore did not fix the problem so Dennis gathered all the information Ms Dupe needed to tell Dell about the issue and get some help. Chances are, he said, the PC maker would issue a fix for it.

The final part of the visit was answering Ms Dupe's questions about the firewall on the machine: enabling the firewall knocked out net access.

The problem was that the laptop had two firewalls. Turning on the Windows Vista firewall conflicted with the one that was already running.

With that fixed Dennis waved goodbye and headed off to his second call of the day.

Wireless wonder

This involved an hour's drive round the M25 to Coulsdon in the London borough of Croydon.

BT engineers will set up PCs and install wireless networks

Dennis expected this visit to be more straight-forward as it was helping a customer install their broadband and get it working.

"That could be a problem," said Dennis pointing to an extension cord that ran from the phone socket downstairs up to the back bedroom where the family PC sat.

"The more internal wiring you have the more noise you have on your broadband line and the slower it becomes," he said.

As it turned out there were a few more problems to clear before the broadband could be made to work.

To begin with, the PC, an aging compact Compaq desktop, was still set to use dial-up. This was a legacy from its owner's former address from where the family had moved about six weeks before.

After that was sorted, the cables had to be connected, the hub re-set and the extension lead swapped for a wi-fi network.

Dennis downloaded and installed some free anti-virus software and cleared the screen of a few nuisance applications.

Finally came a chat about safe surfing and a recommendation to scan every week to be sure the machine had not picked up any unwelcome visitors such as spyware or adware.

And that was Dennis done for the day. One semi-satisfied customer who knew what to do next and one complete success.

"That's what I like about this job," he said. "It's different every day."