This part Saturday, A & I and A’s mom & aunt made the trip to Barre’s world famous Rock of Ages facility to see their quarries and the world’s large granite manufacturing/finishing plant. I’ve written about the Barre quarries before but this was the first time I’d seen them with my own eyes. Massively impressive. See Flickr stream for more.
A has concluded that we will not seek another Dell no matter how desperate for a PC we get. Not after the past couple days nightmare of trying to troubleshoot her precious “Bloody Ninja”. (Well, Bloody Ninja isn’t so much precious as the files on it were.)
So like Wednesday or Thursday of last week it abruptly stopped working. Wouldn’t turn on. Freakish! A dead battery maybe? Well, then why wouldn’t it come on with the AC adapter plugged into it? The little green LED on the AC adapter was coming on. So obviously the adapter is getting power. Remove the battery and try powering on with just the adapter. No luck there either. Seems like a design flaw if it can’t power on sans battery. /shrug/ Where’s the hang up?
We hit the Dell website for some troubleshooting tips. After about an hour of trying different search terms for “laptop doesn’t turn on” and/or “not even POST” we finally get some troubleshooting tips in a knowledgebase article that seems relevant. We run through the “Wizard” interface, checking off each step as we go. Not much luck there. Knowledgebase article’s conclusion? Call us!
Guess where this story is going?
“Call us!” failed to provide a phone number that connected so we hit the link to the form to submit a trouble ticket. (Side note, we’re doing all this on Malkovich at this point…) Additional troubleshooting measures came back over email. Ran through those and sent back out results. (Still couldn’t get it to turn on.) Email comes back: “Must be the motherboard. Contact after-warranty support to arrange for a repair.”
So A calls to schedule the repair. And here’s where it gets good.
FIRST the guy on the phone couldn’t understand how we had gone back and forth with their support reps over email. I thought it didn’t turn on. It doesn’t. Then how…? From another machine. But… Hopeless. Absolutely fucking hopeless. But as if the interrogation over irrelevant details was not enough: $200 to cover shipping and troubleshooting! Troubleshooting? You mean what A & I have already collectively spent over two of our own hours doing? Plus another $300 if it really is the motherboard and we need to replace it. $500? Why not just buy a new laptop at that point? Bottom of the Dell line maybe but at least for $500 I could get something that would turn on.
We decide to think this one over. In the meantime, A brings home her advisor’s spare laptop so she at least has that as a back-up. Something to work on. (Nevermind that he forgot to create a user account for her on that system… But hey, he’s not a techy guy…) So I take another stab at Bloody Ninja to see what we can come up with. And sure enough, I get it to POST and even boot the whole way up. How? By using the AC adapter from A’s advisor’s back-up laptop. Oh yeah! So A’s adapter could get power in to the brick but something in the cord that ran from the brick to the laptop was farked because that was the only place left in the line of failure. Come to find out that there had been a recall on the AC adapters for that line of laptops but only on the adapters from the year before. /sigh/ Extension perhaps?
So we’re out $25 on a new adapter now. Which is a hell of a lot better than being out $500. Still… Ugh… So many take home messages here. Most of them are for Dell. But the one I’ll keep here at the house: No more black boxes ’round these parts.
currently playing: Psykosonik “Secret Life” > Delerium “Enchanted”
Someone put giant handcuffs/shackles on the Burlington whale tails over the weekend. Saw it on my drive in this a.m. Don’t know why. Sends mixed messages. At least, I think it sends mixed messages. Damn but it’s time to get a cameraphone…
currently playing: BT “Shame” (Way Out West remix)
One of several recurring nightmares revolves around a tooth (or teeth) rotting itself out inside my mouth. This was one of those. Throughout the sequences something felt not quite right with my mouth. A little too dry in spots. A little too sharp. A little too loose. I couldn’t pin it down. As the sequences moved along (mostly they were very ordinary vignettes) it became clear to me. The too dry, too sharp, too loose feeling was one of my teeth. It had died and was rotting out. I probed it with my tongue and it hinged away like a child’s loose tooth. It hadn’t quite come out just yet. I tried clenching my jaw, biting down to re-set it. This would work for a few moments at most. The sequences moved along as I experimented with duration and intensity. I was transported to a dojo that had been made out of an old warehouse. It looked like Buzz with the lights on. Alexi was there. The tooth’s last root finally gave out and I reached in to retrieve it. Alexi was aghast. Once out of my mouth, the molar tripled in size. We had an appointment but the tooth required immediate attention. It was going to be weird with that hole in my row of teeth. Alexi asked in earnest: “Isn’t that the tooth you always start on?” He meant when I brush. Don’t I always start on the right bottom molar? I do.
