OT: Dell support

[Richard Kreiss]

One of my neighbors called me after spending an hour with Dell tech support.

Her computer appeared not to be booting passed the post.  All that would
come up was the Dell Logo thing. 

The tech support person had her unplug her flat panel monitor from her UPS
and plug it directly into the wall outlet.  After plugging and plugging the
monitor and doing other things, he concluded that either the processor was
bad or she had bad memory.

Oh, by the way, she did tell them at the start that the monitor was smoking
before she turned it off and shut her system down.

I had her bring the computer to me.  I plugged in one of my monitors and low
and behold, like magic, it came up.  

This is her work computer and she was thankful for only having to replace
the monitor.  Since she wanted to get a larger monitor then the 17" one she
had, I advised her to get a video card rather then using the onboard shared
memory video along with the new monitor.

Installed everything yesterday and she couldn't be happier.

However, it looks like there are gremlins in the community, another
neighbors computer crashed Wed. night.  I need to see if I can get the data
off the hard drive which was not backed up.  This is one of our board
members and there are 3 years worth of documents on that drive.  If can't,
I'll probably have to scan all of these or at least the most recent onto my
system and then burn them to a Cd or DVD.

I think I need to set up a community training course on how to backup ones
computer.  Granted most people won't do it anyway.

Richard Kreiss
GCC Consulting