So, yesterday was the first day since a week ago Thursday that my butt didn’t hurt. I figure I could sit in this chair forever.
I got my morning stuff done, ate lunch, got some water and set up my little portable table and set the laptop on it, got my phone and started on the long process of getting the new computer to see the old computers and vice versa.
The first couple of hours were spent trying to actually speak to someone. The phone number on the pages I received with the computer “was no longer in service”. I called Dell, finally got through to a support person, gave him my information (he was very, very hard to understand because of the heavy accent) and he said “Oh, this is the desktop division, I’ll have to transfer you to the laptop section.” Fine. He did and when I explained my problem to another tech, this one didn’t have the heavy accent, he said “Oh, I’m sorry, this is the desktop support I’ll have to transfer you.”
Scream.
I ended up hanging up while on hold, thinking I’d maybe try something else. Bad idea. What I thought of didn’t work and this time, I couldn’t even get to any type of support. I’d try the extension the tech had given me and would end up with that extension wasn’t active, please call this number. And I’d do that, punch in the extension number and get the same damned message.
Then I tried their online help. And that was no help. At all. Minutes are ticking by and I’m happy my butt isn’t hurting.
Now, everyone I spoke with told me that if the problem wasn’t hardware related, there most likely wasn’t anything I could get for free. They all pushed the “helpdesk” option, which you can pay for per incident or by the year. I was so frustrated, I ended up calling them.
And wouldn’t you know it, I got someone who types like Brian. Or at least he seemed to. He was a nice enough guy, don’t get me wrong, but I swear, Dell should really have better people on the front lines considering how much money they’re making. The guy would put my information in, then tell me “it’s asking me for this” and I’d have to give him something else. I did have the option to pay by credit card or by using my Dell Preferred account. Seeing as I was on a portable phone, I opted for the Dell account. Per incident was $59.00. A year’s worth of service, which would cover all of the computers, would have been $189.00. I don’t need a year’s worth of service. The other computers are working fine. They have been, some for years. I don’t need technical support insurance for them. I don’t need a year’s worth of support for the laptop. I JUST WANT TO GET MY NETWORK SET UP!
We finally get everything set up so that I can finally be transferred to a technician. And back on hold I went. I got so annoyed with the recording butting in to the music, repeating the same thing every thirty seconds or so. Five minutes was bad, ten minutes was worse. And I was on hold longer than ten minutes.
But eventually a human voice came on the line. One with an accent, but a Canadian accent. Woohoo! This will knock at least an hour off of my time, that’s for sure. I explain the problem and it took him almost two hours to finally get me set up. There were a couple of problems. We both found out that the Network Wizard is different for XP Pro and XP Home. And it might not work at all for Win98 SE. We could the the laptop to see the IP numbers of the other computers, but it wouldn’t recognize them as workgroup computers. And we tried this and we tried that. I had to make a recovery disk, because Dell doesn’t send them anymore. You make your own, a one time deal. Don’t lose it, because if you do, you’re SOL. But we did finally get it working and I had hung up the phone by 5:15, just in time to start dinner.
I still had problems though and I finally figured out that the Norton software that came with my system probably was at the crux of the problem. Because I never put the setup disk into the Win98 system and it was seeing the entire LAN when I disabled Norton. Funny, huh? All that time I spent working on it and it was most likely the virus software.
*sigh*
I had set aside today to get the graphic software installed in the laptop because I figured it would be better to use for making my movies. Of course, I couldn’t find the disks I needed, this is what happens when you’re disorganized. I ran an upgrade disk and when it finally started to work, I was given the message “can’t find previous version on this system” so I had to go through my CDs and my zip disks. I finally found it, got the older version up and running, then installed the upgrade. Of course, now one of the bundled programs that came with the early version won’t work. Keeps telling me “there’s no room on the drive”. Excuse me? I’ve got 80Gig of space, there damned well better be enough. I gave up on trying to install it. The DVD software works fine, just not this one set of special effects. I can live without it for now (but I will contact the company from whom I bought it to see what they advise).
So, I start up one of the software programs and try to view one of the previous movies I’d been working on. Crud! It won’t work on a network. I had to disconnect my external hard drive from the main computer and hook it up to the laptop. Then it worked. Lovely, just lovely. I got the peripherals I’ll need for movie making moved over to the laptop. I haven’t decided what to do about downloading pictures from my cameras. I want to keep the cameras connected to this computer, but I don’t want to store the images on this system. Maybe what I’ll do is download them here, then move them to the external harddrive on the laptop every couple of days. I don’t know, but I know I’ll figure something out.
I always do.
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