These are sad times. See, about 20 years ago, I was able to call ATI and actually talked to one of their engineers at length about my problems with their card and they were able to identify the bug with their card (ATI Graphics Ultra Pro - I found a link). I had his extension number. When I did support myself for another unnamed PC component manufacturer, I was one phone call away from engineers, and was able find, identify, and resolve compatibility problems, and turn them over to QA and deployment. Nowadays, support is an outsourced cost center who's only goal is placating the customer by reading a script and hanging up on them as fast as possible. Of course, computer users on the whole are a lot dumber now, too.