Actually it was 43 minutes and 43 seconds of hellish bliss. That’s the amount of time I spent on the phone with Dell discussing options pertaining to the Microsoft Mayhem that destroyed my wife’s machine, leaving me to do cleanup for the last 4 hours.
Dell has automated technical support, requiring a combination of touch tone entry and voice recognition.
Basically what happened was after the intial XP install, I wanted to go install the patches from the Windows Update site. Unfortunately, I couldn’t.
It seems that Dell’s higher end ethernet cards, built directly onto the motherboard, are not supported by Windows XP Service Pack 2. So much for the theory Dell and Microsoft are in bed together. Meaning, I couldn’t get on the network to download the driver to get on the network. Catch-22.
I solved the problem by using, you guess it, the Macintosh, downloading the driver from Dell’s support page, burning it to CD ROM, and installing it manually. At that point, I had 47 patches to apply, and that’s just to the operating system, not counting Office. If I’m lucky, I may be able to convince my wife to try OpenOffice, abandoning Microsoft in the dust.
Well, while I’m managing to get the whole process bootstraped, I notice that I don’t have the audio drivers, DVD drivers, video drivers, and a ton of other things. While I’m downloading these things, I’m calling Dell.
My first round with Dell, which doesn’t appear in the wait count above, was a nightmarish trip through Dell automated support. It asked me what my problem area was, and figuring I’d help them out by narrowing the call to a network card specialist, I said ‘Internet’. The call routing service assumed that my Internet connection was down, and started telling me to call my local ISP. No amount of shouting or button pushing canceled the action. Luckily at that time, my brother-in-law called, giving me a good reason to dump the call with Dell and try again in a better mood.
On my second try, I played dumb, and that transfered me right to a human being who was more than capable of understanding English. Speaking it clearly, not so much.
It seems that there are two additional CDs that “come” with a machine, but don’t ship with it. One contains the drivers you need, the other contains the Dell applications. If you call, and ask, they’ll ship them to you free.
My year of support for the wife’s machine ends in four days, so I lucked out. They’d like me to buy, for $240, four more years worth of hardware support. I haven’t decided if that’s worth it or not.
On the up side, I did discover that Dell has a PC Checkup site that will scan your PC, find specific drivers and applications from Dell that are out of date, and make recommendations to update them. While there, I discovered that my BIOS needed updating as well, not just for my wife’s machine, but for my business one as well.
Looking back, I have to say I was frustrated at having to wait for technical support for so long, but I was very pleased with the level of helpfulness and resolution. Hence my hellish bliss.