The Grouchy Gaijin's Thoughts on Music and Such

I heard a radio interview with Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger of the Doors.

A stoner called in to ask a question.  It was so funny I captured the stream.

This guy sounds a lot like Tommy Chong.

Dell and DHL proud recipients of the Excellence in Stoogerie award

My Dell Laptop which is less than two years old went down for the count a month or so ago.  I started getting all sorts of ominous messages that there had been a buffer overflow, a driver error, a physical dump, a virtual dump and a bunch of other warnings; each warning assuring me that my computer had been shut down to prevent damage.  I contacted Dell and talked with Brian from India - I'm sure his brother is named Paul.  "Brian" suggested I run the Dell/Symantec Ghost utility that would take my machine back to the state it was in when it left the factory.

Boy I'm glad that I backup like a fiend.  Sure enough the machine was back to its initial configuration.  It ran really fast which was nice.  I installed all my software and then realized I had better check Windows/Microsoft update.  There were over one hundred updates including the mammoth service pack 3 for XP.

But wait there was a problem.  The updates failed.  Over and over I got the bad news some (ALL) the updates had failed.  I poked around and found a solution so here it is:

Open a DOS prompt and type  hitting enter after each entry

regsvr32 wuapi.dll

regsvr32 wuaueng.dll

regsvr32 wuauengl.dll

regsvr32 wucltui.dll

regsvr32 wups.dll

regsvr32 vvups2.dll

regsvr32 wuweb.dll

This will uninstall Windows/Microsoft update and let you go to the web and reinstall all of the updates.  There are a LOT of them so it will take some time.  I omitted three other lengthy steps because in my case none of them worked and the last resort was invoking the commands listed above.

But wait there's more.

Shortly after all this was done my computer crashed again.  So I contacted Dell, this time I spoke to Paul from India.  He assured me that customer satisfaction was their highest priority.  Paul arranged for a box to be sent to me in which I could send my laptop to the Dell Repair Center.  (I had a bad feeling about this, but I sent it off anyway.)

I received an e-mail from Dell that my computer had arrived and that they would send me an e-mail when something had changed in the status of my case.  I took that to mean something like they fixed it or sent it back to me.  WRONG.

After a week or so, I started trying to find out what was going on.  Everywhere I turned at Dell I drew a blank.  It was as if I were trapped in something akin to Kafka's Vor dem Gesetz. (Before the Law) Did I really have a computer? I began to wonder.

Then one day I came home to find a DHL notice stuck to my front door.  According to the notice this was their FINAL attempt and they were going to send my package back to the sender - Dell.

So, I received no notice from Dell that anything had been done with my laptop and no notice from DHL that they had my laptop other than the ONE note on my door telling me they were sending it back to Dell because they couldn't reach me.

It gets worse.

I call the number on the notice using the actual numbers and not their cute little alphanumeric phone number because that always takes me twice as long to figure out what number is D, what number is H, what number is L and so on.

Guess what?  The number was to a phone sex line.  So I tried again thinking I must have misdialed. Nope - it was a phone sex line where wild girls were eagerly awaiting my call for several dollars a minute.  I slammed down the phone and thought OK I guess I need to go to their web site.  I then turned the "we missed you" notice over and found a different number on the back.  That number worked.

I spoke with a guy and explained my situation and that I did not want them to send my computer back to Dell.  I asked if they could deliver it the next day after 5:00 PM so that I could be home to accept it.  I was told "No".  I guess their drivers like to go home at 5:00 too.  The guy did say I could come pick it up though, someone would be there until 6:30 PM.  I found out where the local DHL office is and drove across town to get my laptop.  I told the DHL guy I was there to get my computer and he gave it to me.  I asked if he'd like to see some identification to which he agreed, as an after thought, that might be a good idea.  He then told me this funny story about how a guy once came in and picked up a computer for his wife.  The punch line was that the woman who owned the computer wasn't married.  The DHL guy thought this was incredibly funny.  The woman whose computer they GAVE AWAY was not amused.

When I got home and opened the box I found a note that Dell had replaced the mother board which had gone bad.  So far the computer seems to be working fine.

What is the bottom line?  Next time out I think I'm going to buy an Apple.