What is the best site to ask IT support questions?

Question

Sorry if this is not appropriated to be asked here, but I would like to now what is the best site to ask questions about booting hardware and IT support in general.

Answer 1

Thanks for asking here jwerde, asking on the meta sites what is and is not on topic is always welcome.

They will have their own set of rules for what precisely they do and do not like to see in a question, but the SuperUser site is probably the best place in the Stack Exchange family for general IT/Support type questions.

There's some cross-over between them and us but we deal mostly with scale... for example, "why won't THIS machine boot my windows image" probably belongs on SuperUser, and "why won't 1000 machines boot my windows image" probably belongs here.

Answer 2

The answer to your question is a thoroughly convoluted "It Depends" -- mainly on what you mean by "IT support".

As a general rule, Server Fault is for asking about equipment that you support for other people (in a professional capacity). We generally expect that people asking questions here are "the sysadmin" or "the IT department" and have already done a good amount of troubleshooting on their own, with some thorough Google searching being the barest minimum.

As RobM mentioned, there is an implicit assumption of scale on Server Fault -- people asking questions here are supposed to be system/network administrators, and asking about environments (though that doesn't make a question about one machine off topic -- For example, you could be experiencing a problem with a particular user's laptop while other similar units work fine - this would certainly be on topic here).

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Server Fault is not for asking questions about your machine, or friends and family who you are supporting in a "because we're friends" capacity -- basically the site is not "free technical support", or an outsourced IT department for users to consult when they're having problems, and the assumption is users will talk to their IT department, and their IT department may then turn around and ask us.

For "personal machine" or "corporate power user" questions that people don't want to bring to their IT department (yet) Super User is probably the most appropriate Stack Exchange site - their scope is much broader than ours, but they should still not be looked upon as outsourced tech support.