Physician, heal thyself
Two good days of tech support. Two days with problems removed from the list that awaits. Two days that would have been impossible without my good friend Google.
Recently, one of the schools received some of those nifty netbooks that Dell has produced for the educational sector (Latitude 2100). I like them; a machine that does exactly what a kid wants. However, the order pipeline sometimes gets clogged up, and what arrives on the doorstep doesn’t quite match the original desire. As Maxwell Smart would say, “Missed it by that much!”. In more specific terms, one arrived without the touchscreen option.
I called tech support at Dell. We have something known as Gold level, and I was immediately put in contact with a knowledgeable individual, somewhere in the wilds of IndiaNA. We stayed on the phone for one hour, verified all the possibilities and finally agreed that this was hardware, and that I could probably handle the swap. Three days later (yesterday), a large box containing a complete LCD assembly arrived, and with the help of a Flash-y web site the many screws and arrows of my fortune were set aside, the screen was replaced and I was able to touch the dots onscreen. Cool!
Today, I went head to head with a software glitch that affected one whole department. We contact a “mainframe” at the government which speaks like an Oracle. Undone by various software updates, the Jinitiator did one thing: close the web browser with a cheesy grin. I called the government tech support and left a message, but I also continued to Google. Finally, I hit upon a blog, where the steps of another showed me exactly which DLL needed replacement. Download and substitute; profit. All now works as it should, even though the tech support still hasn’t returned my call. I feel rather self-sufficient, when all is said and done.
