The Failure of Tech Support

At a garage sale yesterday, I scored two laptops for $5 each, which excited me greatly. One’s a Dell Latitude CPT (one of those turn-of-the-millenia ones that advertises the fact that it works with Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98. The other one is a Thinkpad 390, which looks like a very well thought-out laptop (I’ve been craving a physical knob for volume, which it has, and it also has a slider for brightness, and fold out feet to tilt the keyboard). Unfortunately, neither came with a power supply (thus the $5, down from $10). But fortunately, my Inspiron’s power supply was the exact thing needed for the Latitude.

Testing the Latitude at the garage sale resulted in the three keyboard lights turning on, the NumLock light turning off almost immediately, the other two staying on, with the power light, for a few seconds, and then the entire thing turning off. No fan activity. No video. No happy “I’m a computer and I’m in use!” noises at all.

The guy at the garage sale pointed out that it had no RAM (ergo the Thinkpad, bought for parts). So I went home, and after a bit of a go-around with multiple laptops, screwdrivers, vice-grips, my sister’s boyfriend’s magical screw-removing talent and the Ubuntu Forums, I learned that the Thinkpad RAM was probably no good, and that even with known-good RAM from the Inspiron, the Latitude did the same thing.

So I called Dell’s tech support robot, which told me after five minutes of pain that I had to speak to a live technician.

The live technicians had some sparkling advice:

• “Are you sure the power supply’s good? Try it with a different plug.” If I don’t have a battery, and the power supply is making multiple lights turn on, odds are it’s good. Also, I’ve been using it with great success with the Inspiron.
• “Oh, your hard drive (borrowed from the Inspiron) may not be supported, we refuse to accept responsibility about it.” Um…I should still see the Dell logo, and be able to enter the BIOS…
• “That hard drive has Windows XP on it, which is licensed for different hardware–it won’t be authorized.” I pointed out that it also has Linux on it, and that regardless <see above>.

So it took me the better part of 90 minutes to learn that, probably, the motherboard was toast. Although their incompetence before telling me that has me kind of doubting anything that comes out of their mouths, so I’ll probably ask for a second opinion at school.

Oh–and you’re probably wondering why I had plural technicians. The first one gave me a line about how the hard drive and RAM weren’t supported, and I lost patience and said, very evenly (it’s no good getting visibly angry), how erroneous that was. She didn’t respond, or hang up, or put me on hold, or anything–I just had a live, quiet line. I said, “Hello” a few times, and then just hung up.