I think that a lot of times I blog about negative stuff that's happened here. Mostly because that's the sort of thing that gets me energized to write, whereas the good things that happen get me energized to do more work.
Here's a more positive experience that I had with Dell's tech support (you can use this as a counterbalance to a previous bad experience with Dell's tech support on a similar issue).
One of the attorneys has a Dell Latitude D600. Sometime last week she called me up to complain that her hard drive was making a lot of noise. I looked at it and sure enough it was making very loud spiking noises as it was reading and writing. Similar to normal drive noise, but amplified. I couldn't see anything else wrong with it, so I told her that we'd monitor it and see if it got worse. Yesterday she called me up and said that she just had a bad crash and the the laptop was running real slow. So I looked at it again and sure enough the event viewer was now full of bad block errors.
Called Dell, got connected to a tech right away, told her the problem, she had me try to run the built in diagnostic (Ctrl-Alt-D) but that didn't work at all for some reason, so she said no problem and wrote up a problem ticket, connected me to dispatch and had them send a hard drive. Dispatch reported that the drive would be here on Thursday, to which I thought "no problem, the drive isn't completely dead yet".
After that, I used Ghost to take a backup of the drive, which took a long time due to the condition of the drive.
Was surprised when the receptionist called me and told me I had a small package from Dell today. Inserted it into the laptop, ghosted down the image I had recorded yesterday and the system is working fine.
So unlike the previous experience where the hard drive died completely in another D600, I was able to avoid that and the user only lost a couple of hours of worktime on the PC as opposed to a whole day or more if the hard drive had failed completely. Luckily these things tend to fail "gracefully" instead of all at once.
So that's my positive blog on Dell's tech support for the week.
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