Saturna

dell is making me their number one enemy.

i bought an Inspiron 5100 last march, which i am still paying on. a mere month after the full warranty has run out (which you cannot extend once it has lapsed, not that they bother to warn you of this) my computer is acting like it is several years old.

specifically, it keeps shutting down, without my prompting. this is (i think) a two fold problem. one, it is too hot. two, in my event viewer, just before shutdown each time, there is an error saying that the "cdrom is not ready to be accessed." well, i am not trying to access it.

turns out the overheating is a known 5100 issue, and not a new one. i am about to update my bios and remove the cd burning software that dell gave me because i also hear that it causes an issue. i have been on the phone with dell over the past few days, including this morning for over an hour while i got transferred from place to place where each person kept telling me i was in the wrong place. i am about to blow a gasket.

and there is also the cultural/language issue inherent with outsourced tech support. i do not have a problem one with any of the working souls that are trying to help me. i understand that they are people like me who are happy to have a good job opportunity and they just happen to be in another country. but i am about to request to speak to an american, and i feel like a piece of shit about it. i just cannot get the grokking i need after days and days of trying, no matter how patient i am. i need someone who not only speaks english as a native language, but someone who has some authority to override the rules. someone who will fix my computer, without great cost to me, since this is a known dell issue.

of course, i never wanted a freaking dell laptop. i wanted a mac and i have no doubt that i would not be having this problem had i been able to get said mac. but i guess that wasnt in the cards, which is an entirely different issue i am not quite ready to get into here on the interweb.

needless to say, i am pissed, stressed out, outright angry in this moment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 7:50 am and is filed under Open dialog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.