This week I heard two stories that made me stop and shake my head. My brother moved to Port Charlotte from Michigan this week and one of the first orders of business was to set up his internet connection. He has a wireless router and network installed and wanted the router to be hidden in a closet near the kitchen. His office PC and his laptop could then be placed anywhere in the house without running any wires. He called the local cable company and an installer was promptly sent out.
The installer hooked up the cable TV and connected the router to a cable connection in the garage. My brother asked him to install it in the closet and was told that the only place the router would work was in the garage. Now my brother knows everything about home construction but nothing about the mysteries of the internet, so he accepted this statement as an absolute.
Later on, he was relating to me how his wireless router was in the garage and he was concerned that he might not get enough signals to connect his computers to the router. I asked him to tell me exactly what the installer said because the cable based internet comes into the home over the TV cables. Consequently any connection in the house that is tied into the cable system can connect to a router and the internet will be available. He insisted that the installer told him that only the garage connection had incoming internet so only there would his router work. Now it is possible that with a very long cable run, there might be a degradation of signal on the cable line, but this was a new house and none of the cable runs were exceptionally long. I asked him to humor me and hook the router up where he originally wanted it. He did and you guessed it, the internet worked just fine.
And finally, a client called me this week and asked me to take a look at her two week old Dell computer that had stopped working. She informed me that she had called Dell Support and in the course of the conversation, she mentioned that the computer had stopped working shortly after a thunderstorm. The Dell technician then informed Kat that lightning damage to a PC was not covered under warrantee and please have a nice day. Unfortunately before he hung up he gave her a case number which insured that the storm information was on record for this particular PC.
I took the PC back to my office and began a series of diagnostic test on the PC and a very thorough examination of the components in the PC. I could find no burn marks, discolorations, expanded or leaking capacitors nor anything that would indicate lightning damage. Also, all of the separate components worked when tested in a working PC except for the motherboard. I then contacted Dell support and began a dialogue with them about this particular PC. They had me repeat many of the tests I had already done and concurred with my diagnosis of a bad motherboard. Then the Dell tech mentioned that they had this PC listed as damaged by lightning and consequently wasn’t covered under warranty.
I informed the tech at Dell that I was also a computer tech with many years of experience and that my examination of the system did not indicate damage from lightning. I also informed him that my initial examination of the room the PC had been in at Kat’s house showed that the PC was connected to a surge protector and that all the other peripheral equipment on the same connection was undamaged. I stated that in my professional opinion, the PC had a defective motherboard and should be covered under warranty. The Dell tech agreed, reinstated the warranty, and replaced the motherboard.
The point of this story is that if you contact any manufacturer about a product that isn’t working; please do not try to offer the support tech help in solving your problem if you don’t have the knowledge or skills to make an informed determination of the problem. That is their job and they are very good at it. But it is also their responsibility to protect the company that is paying them. Tell the truth, tell the facts, but never speculate about what caused a problem.
Computers, you have to love’em!
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Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer (9781467985895): Courtland Nederveld: Books
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Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks! (9781456561734): Court Nederveld: Books
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