Customer Support Experiences

I just had to contact customer support for the program Game Maker. I ran out of reinstalls permitted on a single license and was prompted to contact them, so I did. I got the idea that it might be interesting to share support stories whether or not they are good ones.

For anyone not familiar, Game Maker is developed by YoYo Games. I purchased version 7 for $25. Following the release of version 8, I converted my license for free. Well, several times I had hardware and/or software failures and had to reinstall Game Maker. To prevent piracy, the number of reinstalls per license holder is restricted to 4 normally. I reached that limit. When I sent an e-mail explaining my situation, I got an automated response telling my that a support ticket had been submitted. It even searched my e-mail and determined based on keywords which department to send the ticket to and the priority of it. Being that it was a reinstall, the priority was labeled as high and I got a response notifying me of additional reinstalls credited to my account.

That is a good story. With independent software manufacturers I had some mixed experiences. Some must be real mom and pap shops and unless you manage to get in touch with the developer himself, you usually get very little useful support.
But the worst experience of all was with HP's Indians. They are completely useless and all they do is waste your time. And since Acer took over Gateway, that is a similar picture - and Gateway support used to be A+ when the support teams were in Utah and South Dakota.
PS: I happen to have 2 HPs and 2 Gateways plus 1 Dell. But Dell I never tried.