TurboTax hell!
Apr. 9th, 2007 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eclectic_boyYesterday was going to be my work-all-day-on-taxes-get-them-done-in-one-big-push day. Instead it was my bang-my-head-on-the-keyboard-in-one-big-frustrated-mess day.
I had bought TurboTax, on CD, back in January, and installed it at the time, and run its autoupdate function once or twice before when I poked at the program since then. So I didn't expect anything to go wrong with the further autoupdate that it wanted me to do yesterday. It downloaded several updates and started running them, but one got stuck: "Searching Hard Drive" appeared while the update called 'maceng' was running.... and it stayed there forever. I finally stopped the installer, which corrupted TurboTax so I reinstalled and went to their website for help. There I learned that I could download a standalone autoupdate program.... which got stuck Searching in its very first step. Much poking around various boards led me to a techy fix posted on TurboTax's help site (replacing a file in the TurboTax package).... which didn't help.
The TT help page said that I could email them, phone them (with a hold time of over 30 minutes) or do a chat help session (with a hold time of under 10 minutes). I did the latterest, and the hold time was actually 30 seconds. But the person I got was methodical/robotic, and made me do every step that I'd already done, which took over an hour and brought no success. Finally she said I should try downloading the standalone autoupdater on another machine. Before I went over to Lisa's to do that (thank you, L!) I asked her what I should do if that didn't work, and she said "call the tech support phone number" - which I suspect was partly to make sure she didn't run the risk of having to work on my problem again! As feared, there was no improvement with the autoupdater downloaded at Lisa's (and how *could* there have been; it's the same file!)
So I tried calling. And to hedge my bet, I also opened a chat-help session. I was on hold in both channels simultaneously, and this time it was the phone that was speedy - I only had to wait 10 minutes, during which time the chat window had gone from saying I was number 8 in the queue to number 7. The person on the phone was very calm and professional - she looked at the record of my problem from the chat session, said that a second-tier engineer had been consulted and that the problem wasn't one they had a solution for yet. So she got my address and is fedexing me the updated program so I'll be able to use it without needing to autoupdate. It took five minutes of talking with her and my problem is (hopefully) solved, or at least workarounded.
More googling has told me that it's likely an incompatibility between their installed and OS X 10.4.9, which was only released a month ago. If there were some way to revert to 10.4.8 I could solve the problem, but I don't know anything about that.
I had bought TurboTax, on CD, back in January, and installed it at the time, and run its autoupdate function once or twice before when I poked at the program since then. So I didn't expect anything to go wrong with the further autoupdate that it wanted me to do yesterday. It downloaded several updates and started running them, but one got stuck: "Searching Hard Drive" appeared while the update called 'maceng' was running.... and it stayed there forever. I finally stopped the installer, which corrupted TurboTax so I reinstalled and went to their website for help. There I learned that I could download a standalone autoupdate program.... which got stuck Searching in its very first step. Much poking around various boards led me to a techy fix posted on TurboTax's help site (replacing a file in the TurboTax package).... which didn't help.
The TT help page said that I could email them, phone them (with a hold time of over 30 minutes) or do a chat help session (with a hold time of under 10 minutes). I did the latterest, and the hold time was actually 30 seconds. But the person I got was methodical/robotic, and made me do every step that I'd already done, which took over an hour and brought no success. Finally she said I should try downloading the standalone autoupdater on another machine. Before I went over to Lisa's to do that (thank you, L!) I asked her what I should do if that didn't work, and she said "call the tech support phone number" - which I suspect was partly to make sure she didn't run the risk of having to work on my problem again! As feared, there was no improvement with the autoupdater downloaded at Lisa's (and how *could* there have been; it's the same file!)
So I tried calling. And to hedge my bet, I also opened a chat-help session. I was on hold in both channels simultaneously, and this time it was the phone that was speedy - I only had to wait 10 minutes, during which time the chat window had gone from saying I was number 8 in the queue to number 7. The person on the phone was very calm and professional - she looked at the record of my problem from the chat session, said that a second-tier engineer had been consulted and that the problem wasn't one they had a solution for yet. So she got my address and is fedexing me the updated program so I'll be able to use it without needing to autoupdate. It took five minutes of talking with her and my problem is (hopefully) solved, or at least workarounded.
More googling has told me that it's likely an incompatibility between their installed and OS X 10.4.9, which was only released a month ago. If there were some way to revert to 10.4.8 I could solve the problem, but I don't know anything about that.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-10 12:47 am (UTC)It seemed to have some sort of super-fancy Javascript, which ran really slowly, but apart from that, it seems to have been fine.
Were I to guess, I'd guess that the version on disk was mostly trying to ensure that you hadn't pirated the program; but that's entirely my guess. This is one case where I think an online version makes especially much sense -- you run it once a year, and the software may totally change from year to year, and the GUI demands aren't that great. JavaScript word processors, on the other hand, don't fit my head.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-10 01:01 am (UTC)Hopefully the new version will work; and since it's probably not running JavaScript stuff over the web (and your OS is supported), you won't have the slowness I experienced. (Now I'm wondering if others, not running Linux, found the online version slow...)