Chatting with my Dell Buddies

computer bottom up
Originally uploaded by magscrafts

SUddenly one night last week, my trusty computer started to freeze up in almost every screen. I was trying to uninstall a program and when I clicked on Control Panel, the program list NEVER finished loading. I tried to do online chat with the Dell tech support folks, but that is nearly impossible when your computer is freezing up.

So I called their tech support number, and over the next 3 days spent at least 10 hours on the phone with the tech support reps. Two days in a row, I was still on the phone in my pajamas when my son got home from school. I ran what seemed like every diagnostic known to man (or woman). At the end of the first day, the representative broke the sad news to me that I needed to reinstall Windows. (This is basically the death knell for any information on your hard drive!) luckily, we had purchased an external hard drive, so most of my stuff was backed up.

Well, Windows would NOT finish installing. I repeatedly got to the "completing installation" stage, then the progress bar would stop, never to move again. JR, my rep on day 2, dispatched new hard drive and memory to me. The hard drive was to be preloaded with Windows.

WRONG! Evidently the new hard drive was empty! So me and my very nice rep for day 3, who was very clearly and much too slowly reading a script, started again with trying to reload Windows. (I say he read too slowly, because he would say "When you see the Dell logo, press F12" and by the time he finished the Dell logo had long since come and gone!)

We eventually had success, and I was happily reloading my programs on to the computer when it started freezing again, and at some point, the computer would not even turn on any more! I had to abandon ship and go to NJ to see my mom, and I left the laptop home since it was not working. While I was gone my husband ran more diagnostics and figured out my memory was bad! Jr, from day2, had sent 2 memory things for one slot, so my husband substituted the extra and now my computer works great. I will be typing with my fingers crossed for quite some time though!