Before I start bitching and moaning about how shocking the support is with Lacie, I want to give you an example of how support tickets should be handled by a large company. It sort of ties in with how bad the Lacie support is also, which is a bonus.

On December 26th I noticed that I had an issue with my Squeezebox Boom. The issue was I wasn't getting a particular radio station and I was getting an internal server error message on my device. I posted in the forums hoping for some help and basically I got a 'you need to open a ticket for this' this day after, for a friendly user.

This might not sound like much to some of you but for me it's a positive action and I'm moving forward. I open a ticket, wait two days, which is more than understandable seeing as it's in the middle of Christmas and New Year so I'm not that fussed although I am expecting a response.

The response comes early in the morning on December 31st - they basically ask me what stations I'm having the issues with and how I loaded them onto the Boom. I email back in and two hours later, everything is working fine again. While I was quite pissed that it all went horrible after a firmware update, the lads at Logica did themselves proud by getting it sorted. Bottom line with Squeezebox Boom and Logica; I'll still be a little wary when the next update comes along, but I'll run with it, knowing that if anything does go wrong, it will get fixed and ultimately the service is getting better.

Now to my issues with Lacie. Basically, I've got myself a network attached storage device for simpletons. You're supposed to be able to plug it in and everything is supposed to work, which it sort of does. They don't tell you that you can't do certain things that you'd expect to be entry level features or that it's not as easy as plug and play, which is the impression they give you.

However, once you have it up and running and you finally accept that all it's going to do is stream a bit of music, hopefully, to your XBOX 360 (won't work with the Squeezebox Boom) and that you should be able to access it via a PC on the network (even though you've got to enter your user details and password every fucking time), it's not a bad machine. That is, until you need help from Lacie.

Lacie support is basically worthless. I wanted to use stronger language there but really it is worthless and if you think you are going to get any support you are going into your relationship with Lacie with your eyes shut. The product, when it does work and you accept that it's not going to connect to everything, is very good but when it goes wrong, you are pretty much fucked.

Mine at the minute can't be seen in device manager, doesn't feel like it's running and is just sitting there taking up space. This also all started to go wrong after a software update, which makes it even worse; don't they check these things out first?

My support ticket isn't getting answered, my email to pre-sales about average response times for support tickets isn't getting answered and while you might think I'm over reacting because the ticket was only opened on December 28th, this is my sixth ticket in a year and I've only ever had a response from one. If, after a week they've not answered a support ticket, they themselves close it, even though they've not answered it!

Bottom line with Lacie; I'm stuck with trying to get this fixed but I won't be buying Lacie again and it's quite possible I'll lose all my data on this piece of junk. Next up, I think is QNAP. You can run a Joomla site off a QNAP device!

Update to story: After not getting, what I thought anyway, one of you was very kind to email me the name and email address of head of operations for Lacie in Scandinavia. I copied him into an email I sent to the sales guy at Lacie and today, January 20th, I received a used but neverthless new power unit for my device and it works again.

Just goes to show that it's not what you know but who you know.