Dear Friends,
It is Sunday night, the 19th of February, 2012.

I am continuing to write about my ding-dong-Dell journey; I thought that by now my computer life would be in order, but alas, it seems to be stuck in a technology wasteland.
Let me fill you in on what happened on Friday, the 17th.

I received a call in the afternoon from a Dell technician. He had received the hard drive that was to replace the one in the 14″ computer. This is the first of two that I received to replace the previous duds and it was unclear how to modulate the volume; the assigned keys appeared not to be working. I had called tech support and spent four hours or more on the phone trying a million fixes with the technician to no avail. She told me we’d have to reinstall the operating system. I tried doing it myself as we were out of time, but the driver installation was more than I could handle.

Then I found out from a technician at headquarters that this is easily remedied by pressing the function key along with the assigned key. It was that simple.

She tried to assist me in the driver installation but it was daunting for us both–error messages kept popping up. The solution was to send me a preloaded hard drive and a tech would come to the house to install it.

So when the technician called Friday to do the install I had two problems! In the meantime, the 15″ computer that had initially been working, strangely froze and displayed a black screen asking for a missing file in order to boot up.

I had double trouble. So what else is new??

I also receive a call from a top technician in Texas who had helped me with many previous issues a couple of years ago and he was intent on solving all the problems.

He decided to dispatch another preloaded hard drive for the 15″.

The technician who came to my home was supposed to solve at least one problem. He removed the hard drive and installed a new one. He told me the computer needed to run to set up. It should have taken about an hour.

It ran for hours on Friday and Saturday. I had to shut it down. I don’t understand: if the necessary info was preinstalled on the computer, why couldn’t I just boot it up and see a normal screen?

The new hard drive was supposed to have at least given one of the problem computers a state of functionality for the weekend. Nope.
Back to square one. There was no technician to monitor the installation and I was left on my own.

I am about to update the top technician at Dell. I can hear him crashing into the ceiling now…
You can now go on to part 6, yes part 6 continues here.