Bruce H.

While I'm passing out roses, here's a big bouquet for Sonos, the wireless sound system people. I am a huge Sonos fan:; great hardware, coupled with brilliant software, and backed up by faultless tech support. I was once on the phone for two hours with some Sonos guy in Boston. He said he wasn't quitting until the problem was solved. And he did solve it. And it turned out that it wasn't really a Sonos problem but some bad mojo between my ISP and my router.

Over the last couple of years, the Sonos system has become pretty bulletproof and I haven't had to call for support. Now I get all the support I need from their huge, pertinent forum.

I bought the 1Password app for my iPad and iPhone. This is a rock solid password 'vault'. Even though the app is pretty intuitive, I had to contact AgileBits for a little support. They were prompt, courteous and thorough. They understood my questions immediately and took me seriously and didn't try to jerk me off by referring me to the FAQ on; their website. I've got a lot of time for these guys. Others make promises, but they deliver.

Stay away from iYogi. At best they are clueless; at worst, they are crooks.

I called them because of a compatibility issue between a brand new Windows 8 PC and a 3 year old Epson printer. I thought I was on Epson's driver download site but somehow got intercepted by a live tech support person at iYogi. She took control of my computer and immediately commented on how slow it was running. "Don't worry though," she said. "I'll clean up your computer and get it running properly as soon as I fix your printer problem." 20 minutes later, no progress on the printer problem, but my PC was running even slower and scary pop-ups were appearing on the screen saying things like, "Your computer is about to crash."

"See this box?" She moved the cursor to one of the pop-ups. "Your computer has some serious viruses, but I can fix it. Why don't you sit back and have a cup of coffee while I work?"

"Who''s paying for this?" I wanted to know. It was like pulling teeth to get a straight answer, but finally she said that while a lot of the work was free, it would take $150 to fully sanitize my computer.

Being convinced that iYogi had deliberately caused the problems they were now offering to fix, I pulled the plug on the Live Tech Support. Then I went to work: turned back on the firewall that had been turned off; removed 4 spyware programs that had mysteriously appeared; went to the real Epson site and downloaded the right driver; installed it - and everything works. But I am still worried about identity theft etc. I mean, God knows what they sucked out of my computer while they had access.

Oh yes... my computer miraculously recovered its speed... after I detached iYogi's drogue chute;-)