james mckay dot net

We had a media fast in church last week. No TV, no radio, no Internet, no editing Wikipedia, no blogging. For me, it was enforced by a faulty laptop.

Yesterday, the fast being over, I decided to get down to the business of getting it repaired. I took out a three year warranty when I bought the thing, and I decided that since I’d paid for it, I might as well make use of it. So, with only a fortnight to go before said warranty runs out, I decided to get on the blower to Dell.

Despite the initial assurances from the Dalek on the other end that I would have to wait half an hour before speaking to a real human being, I was on the phone to the usual moonlighting undergraduate in Bangalore within ten minutes, whose job, it seemed, was to try and convince me that it was a software problem.

Now I know for certain that this was a hardware problem. The machine was locking up when I booted into Windows. It was locking up when I booted into Windows safe mode. It was locking up when I booted into SuSE Linux. It was locking up when I booted into Ubuntu. It was locking up when I booted into an Ubuntu live CD.

He got me to spend half an hour running the diagnostics on the machine, taking it to pieces and putting it back together again before saying, “It’s obviously a software problem. I’ll have to transfer you to the software support department, and you will be charged for this.”

Fine. So that’s the name of the game. Refuse to believe that it’s a hardware problem. Transfer me to the software support department. What will they do? No doubt they’d ask me a string of questions, tell me that they can’t help me because I’m running an unsupported operating system but it’s obviously a hardware problem anyway, transfer me back to the hardware department, raise my blood pressure to dangerous levels and charge me a hundred quid for the pleasure.

No thanks.

I’m sure that your average punter would fall for something like this, and no doubt the undergraduate in Bangalore, having dealt with twenty average punters in the course of the evening, thought I was another average punter.

The only thing is, I’m not an average punter. I’m a geek, who knows that software problems simply do not manifest them on three different operating systems on two separate hard disks and a live CD. Yet it still took me the best part of an hour to convince the guy of this fact and persuade him to send out someone to take the thing in for servicing.

And 0870 phone numbers are expensive. Gah.

So the thing’s being picked up tomorrow sometime and taken away for repair. My media fast is being extended for however many more working days Dell see fit to take to fix the thing.

Oh well, I think this will do me a bit of good. I normally spend far too much time at the computer anyway (something Mum is always complaining about) and it’s given me an opportunity to get on with some packing. We’re moving house in only two weeks and there is still a stack of things to do.

So, if you are wondering about the dearth of blog entries and Wikipedia edits on my part, that’s why.

Posted at 18:38 in Miscellany