Customer support gone wrong

My father-in-law told me that his Compaq Presario 900Z wireless internet just stopped working one day. Since it was his 80th birthday I felt sorry for him and told him I would get to the bottom of it. I decided to call Linksys since he was using Time Warner Road Runner with a cable modem with a Linksys router, which was all working fine the last time I was in his home. I knew better than to try Time Warner customer support, as I had done that before and failed miserably, in getting any help that is. I struggled thru for 1 hour with Linksys explaining the problem and then I was finally told that I had a hardware problem where I had to reflash the IP stack. What in the world did that mean? I then called HP as I could not find anything about this model on their web site. For 1 hour I then walked thru the same problem again only to find out he did not know what reflashng meant nor now to fix my problem. I then called Linksys again with my trouble ticket number and for another hour explained the problem all over again - I was not sure what the trouble ticket did for me if I had to start all over again. At the end of the hour, he told me he would try one final thing. That did not work, but at least it gave me an idea of what to try. Finally after 3.5 hours I fixed the problem. Man do I ever hate Windows even more and am all the more thankful for my Apple laptop and iMac desktop at home.