Dell.ca Review
You’ll remember back in June 2008, I bought my laptop from Dell.ca.
Links here and
here.
Since cleaning up my place, buying more furniture and getting everything in order with the studio, I now keep my laptop on my desk, beside my desktop. Since I only ever use it if I’m going somewhere (which means it’s probably been used under 20 times), I turn it on every now and then to update the anti-virus and any microsoft updates.
So the other day I turned it on, did my usual stuff and all of a sudden got a pop-up message to do some diagnostics. I followed the instructions, ran the diagnostics and it gave me this error message which was a hard drive error message. The message also told me to write down the error number to tell the Dell technician.
I called Dell, talked to them a bit after being on hold and being transferred, and being on hold, and being transferred. Turns out they were going to send me a new hard drive – even though I have yet to see any trouble with the laptop. Ok, I’ll live with a new hard drive, maybe it works preventatively… they send you a new hard drive ‘before’ your whole computer crashes.
Anyway, while I’m talking to the guy he’s explaining how I’ll have to install the hard drive and send back the old hard drive. Whoa! He wanted me to install the hard drive in a laptop?
He said he was going to send out a technician but it’s only a hard drive replacement and his supervisor told him to cancel that. I asked about my service plan that I’d paid extra money for when I bought the laptop and he told me that I was no longer covered. The only coverage I had was for the extra, “if I spill a coffee on my computer they’ll fix it” type. And I wondered how come I got no notification of my warranty expiring. How come they, like so many other companies, didn’t email me to say, “HEY, wanna renew this for x amount of dollars?”
I told the guy I was no computer technician and wanted someone to come out and do it. He said he would do that even though it would only take a minute to install it, but the hard drive arrived and there was no promised phone call from the technician to arrange the date of installation. He also told me that after installing it I could call phone support for them to ‘walk me through’ installing the programs.
I know how to install programs. What I don’t know is which of their CDs go in first, where I start and where I finish. For that I guess I’m supposed to sit on hold for half an hour while they then transfer me to another department where I sit on hold and then talk to someone.
All of this is a pain in the ass to me, even though he told me that all I have to do is pull out the hard drive at the back and plug in the other one. That sounds really simple but I can’t help feeling WTF is going to go wrong.
All this says is that I’m not too impressed with Dell. While their service package sounded good when I bought (and I bought a shitload of things from them), I’m no longer impressed. I was feeling like a true believer and a probable future purchaser, but no longer.
I may attempt this tomorrow; I may not. I have to be in a mood for doing stuff like this and in the meantime I lost all the records for the society I sit on due to a computer crash and reformat of my desktop, so I’ve spent all day reinputting that information and I’m not done.
I’m beginning to feel that computers are no longer my friends. Maybe if the weather’s as nice as it was today, I’ll just go out wandering and take some pictures instead. Fuck I wish the holidays would hurry up and get here.
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Lyndon
Well I hope it isn’ t!! Get well soon sickieR 30;
Glenn
jafer
Leya
Female, taken, fire, Sagittarius, Monkey, Toronto, two kids, one grandson, IT.
53
is the new 30. I want the world to close their mouths when they’re eating or chewing gum. If they don’t, I want to elbow them in the face. 
Don’t psyche yourself out, this is not a difficult job.
Depending on which Dell model you have, you may or may not actually need install DVDs. Some Dells have what is called a “rescue partition”, which is an area of the hard drive that contains the Windows installation and all the apps required to make your Dell work. A special keypress sequence during the system startup screen will usually invoke the rescue menu and it’ll automatically install everything you need.
Whatever you do, make sure you’ve got backups before removing the old, failing drive…