Faith in Dell restored

It was a nice sunny day and I was enjoying a rather calm morning meeting. And then that burning smell came into the conference room. As I wrote about months ago, turns out a Dell laptop caught fire 5 floors north of ours and we had to evacuate.

I was a loyal Dell customer from 1999, when I leased my first few business workstations all the way through 2005 when I bought a refurbished desktop [named BigPapi]. Somewhere in the middle, I enjoyed other refurbished (outlet) prices on a 2x 19 inch LCD’s and a laptop. That laptop, a 600m [named Tek], turned 3 last November. That’s like 60 in computer years. I wrote my entire book on it last year and used Tek when I consulted for eBay in 2005. It started slowing on me as it approached the tender age, but with an upgrade to 1GB, it runs Flex 2 like a champ.

Something happened with my upgrade to 1GB. The CDRW/DVD drive just stopped working. I used ‘all my powers and all my skills’ to try and restore it, but alas it seems by IT support abilities had faded with the laptop’s performance.

I turned to Dell’s online chat site for support. It took a short 10 minutes for the remote (really remote) support agent named Vinket to assist me. He/she recommended I download a remoting tool to allow them to fix the issue. Another 10 minutes was all it took for them to remotely fudge some regedit configurations (I couldn’t keep up) and bang, the CDRW/DVD drive worked.

My faith in Michael Dell’s company was restored.

This laptop, Tek, my reliable and now 1GB powerful laptop (with working CDRW/DVD drive) will be retired from active duty and be sent to my 84 year-old grandmother. I will optimize it, of course, so she can remotely view the growth of her great-grandson by way of a Flash Media Server-driven app I built (hosted on Influxis), I affectionately call BabyTV. (More on this in a future post).

And for Dell’s kick-ass and efficient support efforts I have ditched my interest in a Sony Vaio, HP or Toshiba laptop. This week my 5th straight Dell outlet purchase will arrive. A 2GB, 15.4 wide screen, Dual Core 2 powered Latitude 820 laptop. It shall be named DiceK.