Preface: So yeah I guess I brought this upon myself by actually being honest with them and telling them what I need instead of letting them figure stuff out on their own.
I called Dell Tech Support at 4:40pm PST, and was connected to an agent in about 5 minutes (including navigating the voice prompts and entering “secret” express service codes). Now comes Sunny (aka Sooraj) and after giving him the information he needs to setup my profile or whatever, I tell him that I need the applications CD that normally comes with the computer because there wasn’t any CD in the box. He then asks why I would need those CDs, to which I replied, “Because my Media Center PC will not work without the driver for the TV Tuner card and software decoder for the TV watching part.” Now at this point I thought it would’ve been “all good” and he would’ve said, “Okay one moment sir while I prepare a dispatch for those CDs.” But instead out came the following words, “Okay sir can you please go to Start and right click on My Computer and select Properties….” I was like oh crap! What is he going to have me do?!?!
So as it turns out he needed to diagnose and make sure that in fact if I really need the CDs or not. So after I tell him what I see on the screen he has me go to Dell’s remote connection site (http://remote.dell.com) and enter in a session key/id after which my desktop goes away and turns blue, and then he request for control which I grant him. After all this drama takes place he starts doing stuff. Now I’m just watching him look at the drivers and what not, and while he was doing this I was thinking to myself…”oh man what did I get myself into…I could’ve just gone and downloaded the driver myself, and then looked around a bit for the right decoder software!”
Well after he tries installing two different types of TV Tune drivers, he goes onto Google and looks for “decoder software” and is about to download freaking WinMX!! Can you believe that crap?!? At this point I was like screw this! I release control and I tell him oops it looks like I lost internet connection, and I think you’ll need to send out those CD’s anyway. To which he replied, “Sir I can still see your desktop I just don’t have any control.” I was like ooops wrong key….damn! So then he re-connects and does some more stuff (I’m like totally falling asleep here) and then he says “Hello Sir?” and I’m like “huh?, uh…yes?” to which he replied, “okay sir, I’m going to roll back your driver because it seems that your TV driver is corrupted, so if the computer restarts just log back in and let me know when it’s ready.” At this point I was like whatever man, I just want my CD’s, so I said “okay” and he initiated the roll back…and that was the end.
At that point my computer froze, then gave me the oh so wonderful BSOD and now refuses to boot up. Yes that includes in Safe Mode. So what I had to do instead is use good ol bootable Linux recover the pictures, and videos to a USB hard drive and now I wait for the Dell CD’s to come to reinstall everything. Hopefully they’ll send the right disks, or else….can we say “oh shit!”
And here’s the funny thing, Sunny said he’ll call back on the 18th to walk me though reinstallation process. He also assured me that I have not lost any data, and everything will be okay. Granted I won’t loose any data, it’s a PIA to re-install everything and start from scratch.
Oh man, if I wanted to do this I wouldn’t have bought my Media Center PC from Dell, instead I would’ve built my own!
Oh and by the way….I got off the phone about 7:25pm PST.
