The harddrive in my less than 3 month old laptop bit the dust today. Being the good guy that I am, I called Dell Support myself instead of burdening the overworked hardware guys, and all I can say is Wow.

• Entering my Express Service Code actually routed me right to the correct support chain. This is new. I was asked for the info again, but at least I wasn’t shuffled around another time.
• The woman that I got on the line asked the standard questions, and didn’t put up a fight when I said I’d rather not give an email address.
• She also didn’t argue when I said “My hard drive has died.” I described the symptoms (not found in BIOS, laptop won’t boot, makes loud clicking noise) and she said: “I’ve got some bad news, we’ll have to replace your hard drive.” I then say that’s fine, and she replies: “But, you are supposed to cry. Am I going to have to kick you in the shins?” I explain that I support users all day and I don’t put anything important on desktops or laptops. She is not amused, still wanting a response.
• My next statement is “If it is important enough to save, it should be on a server.” She says that sounds just like her brother. I am confused.
• Five minutes later, after all the address information has been collected, she asks if I’ve seen any good movies lately. I tell her no, I don’t go to many movies. She says I should see National Treasure, but she’s really waiting for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy to come out in 2006. When I say I didn’t know that was coming out in 2006, she responds that I’ve earned massive brownie points for knowing what it was. When I say that I wasn’t that impressed with it and it was long, I lose all my brownie points. And all future support calls will require me to jump through every hoop possible.

The moral of the story? I called Dell Technical Support and got someone:

1. Who spoke english as a native language.
2. Was female.
3. Had a clue. (This is not gender related, some Dell Techs are just reading the scriptbook without knowing what any of it means.)

There should be a replacement drive here tommorrow or the next day. Yay for good parts service, boo for crappy quality/low MTBF.

Microsoft actually has a nice database of product support lifecycles available, though you may need to take notes to figure out what the charts mean.

Looks like there is a running theme behind the batch of failed Housing GX270s: failing capacitors. Dell Forums post, and another.

Looks like there’s a new worm afoot on campus this morning, lots of probes at port 445 and 135 to our portsentry hosts. Maybe this new RBot variant or this Agobot variant.

And we were down to less than 60 open tickets.

Update (11/18/2004): Looks like at least some of these were recently reinstalled Windows XP without all the patches. Most commonly found virus was Korgo.worm.v. But, this mini-outbreak reinforces the usefulness of being proactive with network monitoring and using the quarantine vlan.