The Day From Hell!!

[Lo]

What a day yesterday was, Playmates.

I won't blabber on for too long but suffice to say that after several reboots, my computer wasn't playing very nicely.

I'm on this BT deal now (British Telecom phone company), and ergo, get free calls on evenings and weekends. However, I had to dial a premium number in peak hours to the Dell Technical Support company.

I'm not going to say anything racist (naturally), but sadly, the call centre is based in India and I sometimes struggle to comprehend the message being conveyed to me. That's my fault I guess because the three gents I spoke to were all trying their best to speak clearly to me.

I was transfered three times to different departments and come 6pm I was in tears on the phone to my brother. As always, he gave me a telling off because I signed up to pay £69 to Dell for remote assistance but even Dell couldn't establish the problem. Thankfully, the fee was not charged but I can't find my disk with all of the re-installation stuff.

To make matters worse, not one of my keyboards were working and this precluded me from logging back in. Basically it was a monumental and epic fail from start to finish and IE was not responding. I restarted via safe mode a trillion times.

Things are looking a bit better today but I risked losing all of my data with a full reinstillation. My brother said this was not necessary but until he can get here and view my machine, we are not sure what caused the problem.

On that note, if I am not around on here or Facebook etc, you'll know why. Thanks for reading, I am so unknowledgable when it comes to computing so please forgive me

Lo

[xzx]

My brother is a computer tech and he always says to put a few antivirus programs on your computer!

[Lo]

Originally Posted by xzx

My brother is a computer tech and he always says to put a few antivirus programs on your computer!

I'm not sure if more than one is good to be honest....

[Nemesis296]

Originally Posted by Lo

I'm not sure if more than one is good to be honest....

No it's not good, you're right Lo. You should only have 1 antivirus program running on your PC, otherwise you'll slow it down and the two programs will step on each other's toes constantly. Removing one while running the other is also a massive pain.

I feel your pain about tech support Lo, in fact on Sunday my 46" LCD TV totally bit the dust, and calling the support line did me absolutely no good after 2 hours of back and forth with the customer service rep. They are coming out next week to fix my TV (and probably charge me an arm and a leg for the service since it's out of warranty)...why can't fixing technology be easy? Oh that's right, it's easy if you pay a ridiculous amount of money for something that has < 1% chance of happening.

By the way, when you call Dell you can ask for an American / British rep to assist you, and they will transfer you to someone else you can understand. It's no fun being already frustrated by a problem, and adding the incomprehensible fella on the other end of the phone. Been there, done that.

[Lo]

Thanks both for your input

Nem, I am real sore to hear about your equally problematic tech equipment!

I paid almost £1000 for my Dell Inspiron due to the amount of memory and such I customised it with and ergo, did not think any warranty would be necessary.

Thanks for the advice about speaking to a British rep, I shall bear that in mind but I spent so much time on hold it was going to cost me whichever way

I hope you get your TV fixed my friend. I agree, technology is always so problematic to those of us who aren't in the know!!

[KoolKat]

Originally Posted by Nemesis296

No it's not good, you're right Lo. You should only have 1 antivirus program running on your PC, otherwise you'll slow it down and the two programs will step on each other's toes constantly. Removing one while running the other is also a massive pain.

So true - my mum ended up with both Kaspersky and Norton on her laptop and it really messed it up. It kept crashing and ran like a snail. It was also a nightmare for my fiancé to get it off the machine for her.

I think the best way is to have a firewall programme and an antivirus. I use a couple of free ones, AVG and Zonealarm, but there's probably better ones out there.

I hope you get the problem fixed soon.

[Nemesis296]

Blink is a pretty good one too; free for the first year, and I'm pretty sure it's $24.95 for each year after that.

http://www.eeye.com/Products/Blink/Professional

If you run it alongside NoScript with Firefox, it's pretty much impossible for a virus to get on your computer without you telling it to download.

[xzx]

Well you have; spyware, malware, adware,... All this junk you pickup from the internet and bad software putting and doing whatever it wants and your computer will often seize after it's finished. My bro says to set the virus scan and do it everyday. "backup backup backup!", he does that A LOT! He also has 10 laptops! 10! Never rely solely on one computer, ever! Run 'defragment' on every drive. Keep usb flashdrives, those are good. Put your computer electrical cords on a reliable extension circuit breaker. Never store anything on hard drive, they can crash easily.. Hope your O.K., good computing,...

[mad825]

if it's a software problem, try using System restore (providing that you have a save point) as it fixes nearly of problems although you may lose some data depending the date in which you restore it to.

[Lo]

Thanks, that did cross my mind but I couldn't load the system restore page at that time, things were that bad.

To make matters worse I got up this morning to find my pipes have frozen

Only recently I was writing on here about how we shouldn't complain unnecessarily but this could be potentially disasterous. I live in a Council owned property and not unlike military quarters, they are very badly maintained on the whole.

Over a year ago I had a burst pipe and was drenched as I tried to mop up the water, juggle the phone and demand that the emergency plumber leave Mrs Jones where she was and get his 'arris down to mine since my plight was an emergency and he was an hour away.

The kitchen pre dates the 1950's meaning that they have built a kitchen unit not designed to accommodate a washing machine and still enable the tenant to reach the stopcock. Neither is there a solid cement floor, just floorboards on which I laid down lino meaning the water was leaking into the flat below me.

As the situation stands, I went into the bathroom this morning to observe that my cold tap had been dripping and the water was amassing in the hand basin. This looks like my bath water won't drain either so let's hope I am relatively clean so my bath water doesn't have to stagnate for weeks on end

But hey, me loo still flushes - yay for small mercies!!

[xzx]

[COLOR="rgb(255, 0, 255)"]Eidos should go into making pod houses for us cyber cats to flat in! Whatever happened to the arcade?
Was it revolted against as a waste of money or a recluse for recluses?
It seems the 'bar' generation has triumphed against diversity again! College slowly eats away at us, taking what's rightfully ours! Let's just remember all the atrocities that would exist if we hadn't stood up to them then! [/COLOR]