TechUnplugged

After visitng several other sites displaying their computer workspaces and numerous comments on my own. I decided to post images of my work area, enjoy!

I had one really miserable day with Dell yesterday. I have a Dell 700m laptop which I purchased about a year ago. The little pin that registers that the laptop is closed so that it goes into hibernate, broke off. This pin is attached to a strip that also contains the power button. This strip is extremely easy to replace, so I decided to call Dell and have it replaced. When I called in and selected the parts department, I was forwarded to a call center outside the US, most likely India. It happened to be a day where they were having phone issues. After speaking with someone for a couple of minutes, the call would go silent then drop off. I called about ten times, some representatives took my number in case I was disconnected. No one ever called back however, why bother taking my number in the first place? This time I decided to use the home user option, rather than small business. This is when my frustration with their phone system became child’s play. No one in the small business section asked for my Service Tag number under the laptop, however the home section required it. Once they received it they became dumb and had no idea of the part I was describing and required me to go to tech support to get the appropriate part number for them to use. They forced me there even though the part had Dell part numbers underneath it, they said I need to go to tech support to confirm the part number. After transferring me to tech support, the representative asked me for my Service Tag number again. This is when things became out right annoying if not comical. I was informed that my warranty expired and my phone support with it as well. I told the representative that I was not in need of any tech support and that I was transfered to verify a part number for the parts department. Again she went through the routine how she could not give me that information without appropriate service contract on the laptop. I went round for round, telling her there was no way in hell I was going to shell out a couple of hundred dollars just to get the part number for a $10 part. She stood her ground until I told her I had it and wanted a supervisor immediately. She then put me on hold and magically came back within seconds with the same part number listed under the piece I was holding in my hand. Is it just me or does this seem un-ethical to anyone else. It was pretty funny that the small business group didn’t try this, but the home section did. Is it that they think that general home users are gullible and would pay this ransom to replace a part? Shame on you Dell for pulling such tactics! Its one thing to inform a customer that their warranty has expired and offer them the ability to purchase an extension. It is another to force them into doing so even when there is nothing wrong with their system, just to replace a part is just poor customer service.

I had a couple of clients that were dragging their feet to upgrade to Windows 2003. I had to release one as a client because of it The last client finally went the final route to upgrade their servers as well a replace an old server which was a dual P3 server. They ran into problems with backups because their backup solution was not capable of backing up the full drive. They were running a Raid 5 configuration. When I arrived Friday evening to begin the upgrade the first thing to get done was to install an external LTO2 drive to make sure I had full image of their system before all the moves and upgrades were done. With their luck and after my insistent pleading to gets this done before some disaster strikes, it happened the Raid controller froze and destroyed the OS minutes before the backup was installed. With no backup that left me with only one solution, get the OS operational at any cost. The system would not reboot properly and only showed one processor. Rather than attempt the rebuild on the current box, we opted on calling it a night and wait for me to come back in the morning with another box cable of plugging in the Adaptec 2100s controller. The new Dell box they purchased only contained a PCI-X slots so that was unusable to restore the system.
The next morning I brought the box in and had Windows 2003 installed on it prior to me plugging in the Raid controller card. Luckily enough I was able to read the data of the box. I decided to get the important files I needed off it before I attempted any repair. The server was an SBS 2000 box and I really needed to get the box operational so I could get the active directory information. Before doing a parallel install I decided to let the system do a quick repair. After a reboot the server did come back up fully. At that point I did a ghost image of the drive before the drive died once again. After that everything went pretty smoothly. I restored the image to their new Dell box, ran an in place upgrade of 2000 so that the raid controller driver from the new box was recognized by the existing OS. I got his all done at about 3am Sunday morning and was moving on to the next stage the 2003 upgrade. To my dismay, the vendor supplied the end user with the incorrect upgrade and the wrong upgrade licenses. I am actually in route this moment to do the final stage as the client has received the appropriate packages from the vendor.
Below are the pictures of how I had to have the two boxes setup to pull the data off the old machine to a temporary hard drive in the new box.

Over the past couple of months I have been pulling together people and resources to start a weekly technology podcast. The podcast will be called ‘TechUnplugged’ and will be distributed via its accompanying website www.techunplugged.com. We are currently looking for the fourth host for this show. If you are in the industry and feel that you are highly knowledgeable and would like to participate in the production please visit the site and read the ‘Open Casting Call’ post.