5 Star Support

Here is another place for you to get help. The site has been in existence for a while, has a big team, and has helped one of my readers out of many a jams. There's also a newsletter you can sign up for and helpful links.

Protonic.com: Free fast technical support

This is an award winning volunteer effort utilizing some 100 computer experts to answer your computer related questions. Not restricted to Windows! They now also have a discussion forum. Give it a whirl!

Sign up for Microsoft Support News Watch e-mail

You can sign up to receive regular tech support emails for a variety of Microsoft products. These emails are highly informative and contain numerous links to recently added Knowledge Base articles detailing solutions to technical problems. Highly recommended! You can also read back issues online. 

FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions)

This should be the first stop for beginning and intermediate level users of Windows. The new FAQ interface even cycles through several example question to give you an idea on how to best phrase your question. 

Microsoft Knowledge Base

The KB is the support database used by Microsoft tech support engineers. It contains articles on all known problems and their fixes and workarounds. You can access the KB from Microsoft's Web page. The Web interface supports natural language queries in plain English, so you need not be familiar with Boolean logic, but it pays to be familiar with Windows and computer terminology. If someone gives you a KB article ID in a newsgroup in response to a question, than this is the place to find the related article. The answer to about 30% of the email inquiries I get comes from this source, so I encourage you to look here.

Newsgroups - new URL's

Newsgroups are useful for any level user of Windows. It often is a good first approach to see if others experience similar problems. Scan, say, the latest 100 headers of newsgroup articles. If you don't see anything related to your problem, post a question, and there is a high chance someone will know the answer or try to help. Microsoft volunteers are active in many of those groups on a regular basis. There are newsgroups for every operating system (and Microsoft product, of course).

The link above leads you to a list that will open your newsgroup reader (typically Outlook Express) when you click on a newsgroup. There is now also a Web based interface that requires no newsgroup reader.

NT Resources

NT administrators and NT power users are sure to appreciate Wayne's  site. The tips collection is divided into Administrator and User tips (there is also a search box), many of which are linked to relevant Knowledge Base articles. Windows power users are also sure to find something useful if they are well aware of what is applicable to Windows and what isn't.