It’s been nearly two weeks since a virus crashed our laptop and forced us to have to do a system recovery restore, and things are still not back to normal. And the support we’ve received from Dell has been so piss-poor that we will never, ever again buy a Dell as long as this fella is walking this earth.

If the system recovery disk Dell/Windows had me create upon initial system start-up hadn’t included some corrupted Windows files, everything would have been jake. But when I couldn’t get my system to re-boot properly after the system restore, and the Dell guy I talked to in India (my guess is Dell has no U.S. technical support at all) couldn’t figure out why, I had no choice but to have my computer guy here in Gilbert get everything back, even if it took a different version of Windows 7 to do it. Which served the purpose of getting us back in business, albeit without the full-licensed version of Microsoft Office we had purchased with the laptop. Here is where the Dell incompetence really kicks in – they say all we bought was a 30-day trial version, but the total cost of the machine and the order invoice tells otherwise. And yet they refuse to budge.

Because there was no point in arguing further, I downloaded a trial version of Office 365 simply to get us over the hump so that Tracey could at least start our taxes. It only took a few days and finding additional software that we needed but no longer had before we decided it was all pointless. So we filed for an extension. (I’m sure if the IRS / Obama administration reads this blog regularly the answer will be a resounding “no”.)

I also discarded the McAfee anti-virus software that was bundled with our laptop – lot of good that did! – and purchased Kaspersky Internet Security 2014. I also purchased Carbonite’s backup software in case everything were to go to hell once again somewhere down the line.

Now I’m dealing with the problem of activating my Windows 7 software. Because my tech guy had to use a different Windows 7 OS to get our machine back up and running, Windows has detected that this particular OS needs to be activated, but the product key on our machine and whatever was loaded by my tech guy doesn’t match. And, because you can’t have a product key installed on multiple systems, I can’t use his OS product key on my machine. Meaning, I’ve got to reinstall my original OS back on this machine via system recovery. Meaning, I’ve got to work with the damned Dell folks in India again. Meaning, having to go through the whole process of explaining to the Dell guys once again that the system won’t re-boot properly after system restore.

I tried to tell the Dell folks that my system recovery disk has corrupted files, but of course the guy I’m talking to knows nothing about the first guy I talked with when I had my original system recovery disk problem. Or the second lady who insisted on sending me out a new Windows 7 OS recovery disk that has nothing in common with the system recovery disk I have with the corrupted files – I’ll be taking a bigger step backwards by having my C drive completely scrubbed. Which, in turn, means I’ll be spending Easter weekend tracking down and reloading all the software installs I did two weekends ago.

I suppose we could just start over and buy a new machine, but what’s the point of that? I’ll still end up having to reload software and I don’t feel like forking out significant dough-re-mi for yet another new machine.

I don’t want to sound harsh, but Dell technical support sucks. And it’s not the fact the tech team is all India people – heck, I have India folk on my team at work. It’s just that they are not very good. At least now they tell you their real name as opposed to some dopey American name when you know damned well you’re not speaking to an American. One time a guy answered and told me I was speaking to Rocky; I figured that week he was taking his names from American movies.

All in all, it’s just a crappy situation. Having to go through this is almost as bad as having to do your own auto maintenance.