Episode 14: The Killer's Last Stand
I'm done doing battle. It's finished and over. I'm now hardwired in and cruising at maximum velocity through the datastream. I'm howling along the superhighway at a speed yet unrecognized by anyone on the planet.
The past week has been marked by frustration. The eMachine died and I'd ordered a Dell. From the technical specs, this would have been the best one yet.
Let's get down to business. First, I got the machine in and popped the hood. The only piece of hardware that I could effectively transpose was the sound card. That meant my secondary hard drive would not fit. Nor would any of my other optical drives. Imagine my frustration at that.
Okay, no problem. I would just have to get an adapter for my hard drives. Second, program installation became a daily ordeal. Vista had it's problems, sure, but never like this. Installing each program only caused me to have to reconfigure settings, experience computer lockup and, worse yet, once I installed Audition (my sound editing program), the whole thing locked up like a kid with epilepsy and had a meltdown.
My laptop has the same version of Vista and the worst that's ever happened to it was a color scheme incompatibility. Not that that was ever that huge of an issue...at least it still worked. With the Dell Studio 540, the whole system went sideways. The taskbar reverted to a Windows 98 look and most of my programs vanished. It was as though they never existed.
By day four, the thing was blue screening and crashing on startup.
The day before, I'd called Tech support. I'd bought the computer within the allotted time frame and it did have Vista Home Premium, I should have been able to upgrade to Windows 7 for free.
Nope, not even. Apparently, there was going to be hardware driver issues with that operating system.
It's things like that that make me want to randomly scream the word "FUCK" at random.
I mulled it over at work on day four and when I got home, I thought about just biting the bullet and working with it. That's when it started blue screening.
Long story short, this thing simply won't work for what I need it to do. I was lead to believe it would, Strike One. I was also the victim of the unannounced fifteen percent restocking fee, Strike Two. Then, there was the unannounced fact that I'd get my money back on it THIRTY DAYS after the computer is returned. Strike. Fucking. Three.
Keep in mind, the whole time this is going on, I've got some tech guy telling me that he's going to be working on getting me a replacement. Now, I don't even want to deal with them anymore. I'm already of the mind that if I find the first motherfucker that works for this company or see one of those irritating Lollipop commercials ever again, I'm going to destroy the TV that displayed it or pop the shit out of the employee for the irritation they've caused me.
This technician called me back while I was on the road Sunday to tell me he'd come to save the day. I told him I'd already taken care of the problem. Today, some chick from Dell calls me at work to tell me that I'm eligible for a heavily discounted computer.
Okay, look. You can knock some cash off of the price if you want but you know damned good and well that the damn restock fee will make up for that so fuck no.
The night that I started repacking the computer, we'd found an HP with....ready to be sick?
*taking in a deep breath*
750 GB Hard drive, every card reader ever concieved, a lightscribe optical drive (meaning that I don't have to transpose the other one that I own) 8GBs of RAM and an AMD Phenom Quad-Core Processor.
I'm currently sending my office chair off to have a crash harness and rollbar installed. Now, the litmus test came tonight when I installed Audition. Guess what? Nothing. It works. I can't stick any of my old shit into this thing but really, would I need to?
Dell seems to be of the mind that their shit doesn't stink. I'm here to prove otherwise. Once I'm done installing all the shit I'm installing, I'm going to make damned sure that no Dell computer ever sees the light of ownership in this household ever again.
The job is also undergoing a reimaging. We are now simply known as The Church and a new Bible was issued. There wasn't much to it and the video from our Pope only proved one thing...he could have been a candidate for the Blue Man Group. Lots of propaganda has been issued but not much else has happened.
Recently, at The Church, a couple came in with questions about a possessed laptop screen. I told them that I was afraid the news was dire. It sounded like a hardware issue. The same hardware issue prior to my computer dying. Apparently, they went with a Dell too and, according to them, Dell's tech support services used to be nothing short of awesome but now, they've gone to hell.
eMachines can't handle my workload, Dell can't handle a simple request, and HP just kicked both off the top of the mountain...in only two days no less.
HP/Compaq...it's the only way to fly.
The past week has been marked by frustration. The eMachine died and I'd ordered a Dell. From the technical specs, this would have been the best one yet.
Let's get down to business. First, I got the machine in and popped the hood. The only piece of hardware that I could effectively transpose was the sound card. That meant my secondary hard drive would not fit. Nor would any of my other optical drives. Imagine my frustration at that.
Okay, no problem. I would just have to get an adapter for my hard drives. Second, program installation became a daily ordeal. Vista had it's problems, sure, but never like this. Installing each program only caused me to have to reconfigure settings, experience computer lockup and, worse yet, once I installed Audition (my sound editing program), the whole thing locked up like a kid with epilepsy and had a meltdown.
My laptop has the same version of Vista and the worst that's ever happened to it was a color scheme incompatibility. Not that that was ever that huge of an issue...at least it still worked. With the Dell Studio 540, the whole system went sideways. The taskbar reverted to a Windows 98 look and most of my programs vanished. It was as though they never existed.
By day four, the thing was blue screening and crashing on startup.
The day before, I'd called Tech support. I'd bought the computer within the allotted time frame and it did have Vista Home Premium, I should have been able to upgrade to Windows 7 for free.
Nope, not even. Apparently, there was going to be hardware driver issues with that operating system.
It's things like that that make me want to randomly scream the word "FUCK" at random.
I mulled it over at work on day four and when I got home, I thought about just biting the bullet and working with it. That's when it started blue screening.
Long story short, this thing simply won't work for what I need it to do. I was lead to believe it would, Strike One. I was also the victim of the unannounced fifteen percent restocking fee, Strike Two. Then, there was the unannounced fact that I'd get my money back on it THIRTY DAYS after the computer is returned. Strike. Fucking. Three.
Keep in mind, the whole time this is going on, I've got some tech guy telling me that he's going to be working on getting me a replacement. Now, I don't even want to deal with them anymore. I'm already of the mind that if I find the first motherfucker that works for this company or see one of those irritating Lollipop commercials ever again, I'm going to destroy the TV that displayed it or pop the shit out of the employee for the irritation they've caused me.
This technician called me back while I was on the road Sunday to tell me he'd come to save the day. I told him I'd already taken care of the problem. Today, some chick from Dell calls me at work to tell me that I'm eligible for a heavily discounted computer.
Okay, look. You can knock some cash off of the price if you want but you know damned good and well that the damn restock fee will make up for that so fuck no.
The night that I started repacking the computer, we'd found an HP with....ready to be sick?
*taking in a deep breath*
750 GB Hard drive, every card reader ever concieved, a lightscribe optical drive (meaning that I don't have to transpose the other one that I own) 8GBs of RAM and an AMD Phenom Quad-Core Processor.
I'm currently sending my office chair off to have a crash harness and rollbar installed. Now, the litmus test came tonight when I installed Audition. Guess what? Nothing. It works. I can't stick any of my old shit into this thing but really, would I need to?
Dell seems to be of the mind that their shit doesn't stink. I'm here to prove otherwise. Once I'm done installing all the shit I'm installing, I'm going to make damned sure that no Dell computer ever sees the light of ownership in this household ever again.
The job is also undergoing a reimaging. We are now simply known as The Church and a new Bible was issued. There wasn't much to it and the video from our Pope only proved one thing...he could have been a candidate for the Blue Man Group. Lots of propaganda has been issued but not much else has happened.
Recently, at The Church, a couple came in with questions about a possessed laptop screen. I told them that I was afraid the news was dire. It sounded like a hardware issue. The same hardware issue prior to my computer dying. Apparently, they went with a Dell too and, according to them, Dell's tech support services used to be nothing short of awesome but now, they've gone to hell.
eMachines can't handle my workload, Dell can't handle a simple request, and HP just kicked both off the top of the mountain...in only two days no less.
HP/Compaq...it's the only way to fly.
posted by Lord Genocyde at 11:31 PM
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