Bad Dell Tech Support

A client, who had been dealing with Dell technical support, came to me with his Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop that no longer ran. The machine came with Windows XP SP1 and after installing Service Pack 2 it slowed down. Then while trying to download the post-SP2 patches it hung.

The first thing Dell had him do (in response to a different set of software problems) was restore the machine to its factory fresh state. There is a hidden copy of Windows on the hard disk for just this purpose and you invoke the recovery program with Control-F11 during system startup.

That worked, the machine was restored. But problems continued.

Next, Dell had him do a clean install of Windows from a Windows CD. This worked too, but the machine had no software on it other than Windows itself and only ran at 640x480 screen resolution.

He wanted the pre-installed software, so Dell tried to restore again to the factory fresh state. But the restore refused to run. Control-F11 no longer invoked the restore program. At this point he came to me.

The only real problem was the incompetence of Dell technical support.

Dell mistake number 1:

Restoring the machine to factory-fresh state requires a special Dell-specific Master Boot Record (the first thing run by the computer after the BIOS has done its job). It turns out that a clean installation of Windows XP updates the Master Boot Record and wipes out the fudges Dell put there. This breaks the Control-F11 feature. So Dell tech support told him to do something that made it impossible to later restore to factory-fresh state - and they didn't know this. When faced with the problem of not being able to restore the machine, Dell support said he must have wiped out the partition.

The story continues:

The main problem after the first recovery back to factory-fresh state was the machine running very slowly. Extremely slowly. This happened after installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 (again, the machine shipped with XP Service Pack 1).

After I restored the machine to factory-fresh state, I un-installed all the junky software that Dell pre-installs on their consumer machines. Then I installed Service Pack 2 and the machine slowed to a crawl. Using Process Explorer I could see the huge amount of cpu being used but there was no one culprit. I turned off all auto-started programs and all optional services to no effect. The "Explorer" process was using alot of cpu time.

Since no applications were running and cpu usage was still very high, it had to have been SP2 that caused the problem. I remembered that when SP2 came out some vendors created updates for their computers that had to be applied to make them SP2 compatible.

Long story short, installing the Dell updates for SP2 that applied to the Inspiron 1150 fixed the cpu usage problem. The machine ran ten times faster than it had been.

Dell mistake number 2:

Ignorance of the above. Dell created updates for SP2 for this machine and yet tech support never suggested installing them when faced with the problem of SP2 slowing down the machine.

Dell mistake number 3:

In searching for the relevant updates to this machine, I entered the service tag at Dell's support site and was presented with a long list of updated software and drivers. A very long list. Too long. It included driver updates for many hardware devices that this machine did not have. For example, there were updates for four or five different optical drives. It was up to me to research the actual hardware and find the appropriate updates.

Other computer vendors do a better job of this. They have software that handles the finding and installing of the correct driver updates. Even if writing software is too hard, how hard can it be to maintain a hardware inventory by service tag and only display the appropriate driver updates? Too hard for Dell it seems.

A huge thank-you goes to Dan Goodell for writing the DSRFIX program that zapped the MBR and made Control-F11 again invoke the recovery utility. It was a life saver. Dan has documented this in great detail. See his Inside the Dell PC Restore Partition. Thanks Dan.

You could consider Dell's lack of documentation about this and their not creating a similar program, their fourth mistake.
Posting viewed times since May 31, 2007

Done With D-Link

I will never buy another D-Link product again. Neither will any of my clients. They have been added to my Axis of Avoidance.

I say this based on an experience with an external USB WiFi network adapter, model DWL-G120. In brief:

On the first computer I tried it on, the adapter wouldn't even install. The first response from D-Link tech support was typically useless. I expected that. On the second computer, the software crashed while being installed. Still, on this machine at least, I did get Windows to recognize the adapter and Device Manager to say it was functional. But, it wouldn't connect to any WiFi network.

Then it turns out the adapter does not support WPA encryption despite the fact that the retailer (NewEgg) and D-Link both say that WPA is supported. I'm returning it to NewEgg based on this mis-representation.

Registering the adapter was also miserable. The online registration application doesn't work well, the questions they ask are extremely personal (like how much money do you make and what are your hobbies) and the registration web page is specifically designed to trick you into giving permission for them to spam you.

And uninstalling the D-Link software on the second machine was also a problem.

At my computergripes.com site, I've documented all the details about my DWL-G120 experience. But, in a nutshell, avoid D-Link.

Dell computer printing problem

I just added a new Dell gripe to my computergripes.com site. A relative couldn't print on his computer, all the printer definitions disappeared. He couldn't add a new printer definition due to an error with the Print Spooler service. The event logs had many errors, too many for a phone call.

I remotely controlled his machine and found that the Print Spooler service wouldn't start because it depends on the LexBce Server service which wouldn't start because it was disabled. Turns out LexBce is Lexmark printer software that Dell pre-installs. Thanks for nothing Dell. This machine had no Lexmark printers attached to it.

The real problem is why the Print Spooler depends on Lexmark software if there are no Lexmark printers. Or put another way, the real problem is Dell. I enabled the LexBce service, started it, started the Print Spooler service and all was well. For more, see the computer gripes entry.