Dell? No Thanks

Everyone knows that I used to work for Gateway, so I'm somewhat partial to the company. It was very good to me and I would go back to work for them in a minute. Well at least the Country Stores. I'm not sure about the other channels, but we used to have a blast in that place! Tons of great memories and stories from Gateway! I'm sure I will share a few of them with you guys in this blog in the future, but for now I want to share a little story with you about my brief experience with Dell.
Two years ago, I bought my dad a Dell computer from Aaron's Sale and Lease. Why from Aaron's? You know what they say about black folks and credit? Well there you have it. Anyway, his grandchildren somehow managed to muck it up and it either needs to be reloaded or the drivers for the modem need to be reinstalled. When you buy a computer from Aaron's you don't get any software. In fact I think a lot of the computer manufacturers are making you burn your own restoration disks nowadays. Not a horrible thing if they charge you less for the computer, and with the prices of them these days I can't complain. We don't have the restoration disks so I decided to call Dell. It took me several minutes on line looking for a phone number that didn't lead to sales, and when I did find it of course it didn't give me an option for tech support! I only wanted to ask them how I would go about getting the disks sent to me even if I had to pay for them. Since I couldn't get a hold of anyone on the phone, I decided to hop back on line and download the drivers myself. Of course navigating Dell's website wasn't took me longer than it should have. It drives me crazy how difficult PC makers make the websites to navigate. Gateway's used to be the same way. Anyway I found the drivers I needed, at least I thought I did! I found at least 10 different files for the modem, 4 of which were labeled "drivers". How in the world can there be 4 drivers for one modem? So I just start downloading like a mad man until I realized that once I burned these to a CD and took them to my dad's place I would have no idea which one to install! Now I'm getting pretty frustrated and as a last resort I decided to join Dell's forum to get some help from other Dell customers that may have experienced the same thing I was going through.
I fill out the application to join the forum which seemed more difficult than it needed to be! It took me 6 attempts just to pick an "approved" password. Finally I find one then I have to wait for an email to activate my membership. This is something that I'm used to because I join tons of forums and if they didn't do this you would have all of your friends signing you up for stupid off the wall stuff that you wouldn't know about until you started getting strange emails! What I didn't expect was for it to take as long as it did! I opened my email program up and expected the message to appear immediately, so I hit update. Nothing. I hit update again. Nothing. I hit update again. Nothing. I go and make myself a hot dog, and when I come back nothing. I go and make myself another hot dog. Nothing. I hit update. Nothing!!!!!! What could possibly take so long to activate an account for a forum????? I finally went to bed and gave up in total disgust. When I woke up to go to the bathroom I couldn't get back to sleep so I decided to go downstairs and fool around on the web. Sure enough the email was there! Too bad I had no desire to visit their stupid forum! Ugggggghhhhh!
I'm going to try my hand at reinstalling the modem before I do a complete reload on the system. If I can just get the system back on line I can hop directly onto Dell's website and download any drivers or updates it needs instead of burning them all to a CD and hoping I downloaded the right one. Wish me luck.

DT