nelson_p@apollo.HP.COM (Peter Nelson) (02/21/90)
On numerous occasions I have found myself in need of technical advice on PC-related subjects. Since my background is technical to begin with, my questions are also technical: differences in BIOS's, OS's, pros and cons of different windowing or multitasking systems, differences in performance between different processors, benchmarks, software compatibility tests, diagnostic software, and many other topics. Once in a while I will also have a "where to buy" or "Brand X vs Brand Y" question. Where can I go for such advice? I will often post questions to local BBS's or to Usenet, or to our "pc_users" mailing list here at HP/Apollo. Sometimes I get responses, often I don't. When people do answer they are taking time out of their busy schedules to do so, and I appreciate the kindness but I also appreciate that nobody really has any obligation to pass out free advice and, anyway, you get what you pay for. Sometimes I will call local computer stores but I've found the knowledge level at such places very low, and anyway they are biased by their desire to sell me something. We have an extensive technical library at work and I often look things up, but that can take a lot of time and many PC publications are not very well indexed, if indexed at all. Question is this: Are there any commercial services offering advice or answers to technical questions for a fee? I don't want a full-time consultant but it would be nice to have a phone number to call where for some reasonable hourly rate I could get advice about PC-related matters with some confidence that the guy on the other end knew what he was talking about and had no commercial incentive to steer me in any particular direction. When I look around this newsgroup at the huge volume of questions people ask it seems there would be quite a market for this kind of service if the rates were reasonable. Comments? ---Peter