So, Dell finally called me back Friday night. That’s three days after they were supposed to call. Three days after they said they would call. Guess what the outcome was? Well, the “tech” told me to do the exact same things he told me to do on Monday. I told him no, because we already did all that and the buzzing in the monitor was still occuring and I wasn’t going to waste my time doing it when the buzzing was still there and it would get us nowhere since he was going to tell me “he’d call back the next day” just as before. So, he says he was going to look for possible solutions with his supervisor or whatever and call me back in 10 to 15 minutes. I guess 10 to 15 minutes in India is the same as three days, because I still haven’t heard back from him. This is unacceptable.
Tag Archive for: Technology
I’ve been happy with my two computer and one mp3 player (1st gen Dell Jukebox from a long time ago) purchases from Dell. I’ve never had a problem with any of their products. I’ve never had to contact their customer service, and I’ve recommended them to others. That has all changed this week. On Monday night I contacted their support via the live chat on their website. The problem I’m experiencing is an audible buzzing that my 22 inch wide screen monitor is making. Googling for a solution to this I found some people say turn the brightness down under 75. That made my buzzing worse, so I went the opposite direction. When I got up to about 91 the buzzing stopped, but wow, what a bright screen. Since the computer and monitor are less than a year old I decided to contact support. I don’t want to go a few months and have my monitor go out on me right after it’s out of warranty. So I chat with the technician. They have me do all the same things I told them I’ve already done. Move the speakers away, plug it into a new outlet. Check to see if the buzzing is there when the monitor is off. I answered all these questions before they ever told me to check it, but they told me anyway and I did. Well, the tech told me he’d follow up with me the next day with a phone call. Guess what. No call. So I respond to the ticket via email on Tuesday night after not hearing anything form the technician. No response to that email. I emailed support again this morning and I have yet to hear anything from them. I should call, but do I really want to spend 5 hours on the phone with someone in India, only to have them hang up on me several times and put me on hold forever as well? I guess if it means getting a product that’s not defective it’s worth it.
Not long ago I bought a 500 GB usb external hard drive. I wanted to keep backups of all my documents, music, and pictures on it. I partitioned it so I could also back up my MacBook using Time Machine. I’ve been searching for a program to sync any new documents and music and whatnot on my Vista machine onto the external drive when I’d add it to my primary hard drive. I couldn’t find any decent free program that would do this and copying all the files manually just wasn’t efficient. Windows Vista has a backup solution built in but it wasn’t what I was looking for. In the Vista backup utility you can select types of files but not specific folders and directories. I wanted something that would allow me to select which files to backup and where to backup to. I posed the question in #habari and h0bbel gave me a suggestion, SyncToy. It’s a free download from Microsoft and does exactly what I want. As you can see in this screen shot, I was able to tell what directories to sync on my machine and which directories I want to sync them with.
It has a great, easy to use interface that is quite intuitive. You add folder points on each drive then click sync. It worked perfectly when syncing up all my files. The only thing I wish it did have was a schedule so it would perform syncs daily, weekly, or monthly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a feature that’s added in 2.0. Maybe sometime in the future that feature will be added.
I am by no means an Apple fanboy. I only have one Apple product, and that’s my MacBook. I will say that since I’ve gotten my MacBook, I now think all my future computer purchases will be Macs and not PCs. This has nothing to do with me being a fanboy. I just really enjoy using my MacBook and Windows Vista drives me nuts more and more each day. That being said, I have to say I was disappointed in this year’s Macworld. I was expecting much more from Apple. While I didn’t think they would actually release a tablet portable device, the thought was cool. Instead they release the MacBook Air. Excuse me while I yawn.
iPhone and iPod updates were surprising. First, the lack of a 3G 16gb iPhone upset me. I was expecting this to debut at Macworld. At least I was hoping it would. My current contract is up in April and I was hoping to maybe get an iPhone when it ended. I doubt that’s going to happen now. Especially since AT&T promised a 3G iPhone in 2008. Why would I buy one when a new one will be coming out later in the year? The only thing they did was update the firmware for the iPhone and iPod. Those were good upgrades but I can’t believe they expect people to pay $20 to update the iPod touch. That seems a bit ridiculous to be, but this is the Apple culture. The fanboys are known to pay anything that Jobs pushes, so Apple will get their $20 from thousands of fanboys.
A new Apple TV came out, but that gets another yawn from me. I’ll stick to Netflix or Blockbuster Online thank you. Overall, I thought the expo was disappointing. The one big announcement was the MacBook air. I like my MacBook as is. I don’t want to sacrifice an extra USB port and user-replaceable battery for extra thin body. Besides, I use my optical drive. No thank you to that product, especially at it’s hefty price. Oh well, there’s always next year.
There is something I don’t quite understand. Maybe someone can explain it to me. A few months ago Google gave IMAP support to Gmail. Everyone was happy to have this sought-after feature enabled finally. In my opinion, it was a few years too late. I never use desktop mail clients anymore (except when I was working for a technology company and we used Exchange). For something like Gmail, I just don’t see the point. The only thing I use a desktop email client for (and I use Thunderbird for this) is to back up my Gmail accounts. I don’t send mail from Thunderbird and I don’t read mail in Thunderbird. Maybe I would use a desktop email client if I used a different email service. I like Gmail’s interface too much to do that though.
Recently, Newsgator released their popular NetNewsWire and FeedBurner desktop RSS clients for free. You no longer have to pay for them. Again, I don’t understand why people would want to use a desktop RSS client. Sure, it can synchronize all your feeds so even if you aren’t at home it won’t give you the same feed as unread over and over. But you know what else does that? Web-based feed readers, such as Google Reader. Why download something to read when you could just as easily open up your browser to read it? Chances are, you’re already going to be on the net anyway.
Another thing I never understood was using things like Microsoft Live Writer and other such desktop blog publishing software. Why work with desktop software to publish to your blog? I know a few people who do that, but for me, writing in the administration of my blog software is perfectly fine. I don’t need to write my post in a piece of software that wasn’t even specifically designed for the blog engine I use.