So I got home from work friday evening and I went to log onto play WoW. I was all chomping at the bit because this was the long awaited Lunatics vs Pancake Bunnies Battlegrounds night. So I goto turn on the computer and the girlfriend lets me know that she had turned it on earlier and it wasnt working. So she just turned it off. Curious I made sure everything was connected and turned it on. After an initial boot screen I was sent to the most horrible screen ever.
The Blue Screen Of Death.
I stay calm but after a 30 minutes of looking around I decide to concede defeat and call Dell technical support. We chat for a bit and I tell them my problem. As soon as they realize I have a hardware problem they go on an extra long rant making sure I know that my Warranty ended in December of 2005. I assure them I understand and I just want to see what I can do and possibly locate the specific problem. After another 20 minutes we figure out that my Maxtor 160gb HD is dead, kaput, gone forever as well as everything on it. They once again mention that the warranty is over and I acknowledge that I dont care. I thank them for there time then they mention I might get a customer service rep survey in e-mail. They let me know which mark is the highest. Fun stuff.
So the next day I call up a couple computer stores and find a replacement 160gb HD for 96$ canadian which isnt too bad. So I go over pick it up and head home and install it and then reinstall windows xp. No problem, nothing too hard. However once i have XP installed and am ready to go onto internet to install drivers I find I cant access the internet. So after some searching I notice the ethernet/network card doesnt have the drivers installed so I look through the disks that I have from Dell. They dont have drivers for it. So I call up dell (they once again remind me that warranty is up) and ask them and they are worse than useless. No help at all so I ask them to tell me exactly what the make and model of the NIC card is so I can download the drivers at a friends. However the girl has a thick indian accent and just blazes through it so I cant get it down. Finally after 5 attempts I stop. I thank her for her time and she tells me about the survey I might recieve and the high score.
This morning I went to a friends place downloaded the drivers I thought would be applicable. Drove home, they worked and I am currently in the process of repatching and reinstalling all my programs.
I have to say Dell sucks monkey balls. I managed to get it all done all on my lonesome. All they cared about was stating that my warranty was out. When I asked for actual technical support or questions about my rig they were **** poor (except the first person who helped me recognize it was the HD that was fried).
Bloody dell and bloody having to reinstall everything from scratch. I am also bloody heart broken I lost all my music