found drama

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”

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