Tag Archives: tech support

Refreshing Tech Support

It’s happened again … I had some really GOOD tech support.

The phone adapter for our VOIPo service died … no dial tone, no connection, nothing.

Oddly enough, I could log in to the devices web interface … so I contacted VOIPo customer support.  After a few email exchanges, it was determined that they would need to do some interactive diagnostics to determine what was going wrong.

I called them and talked to James … he had me test a few things … and then said something truly amazing … “Could you put the VOIP adapter in to your routers DMZ so I could take a look at it directly?”.

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Dell Chat Support Flub

In general, I’ve been quite pleased with the technical support I get from Dell’s Small & Medium sized Business division.

They usually adapt quickly to my level of technical expertise and take my word for it when I report a problem.   Once the failing component has been identified, they quickly setup the appropriate dispatch to get the problem corrected.

Yesterday, however, was an exception.

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Bad Video Card

My poor little Laptop … something’s gone wrong with it’s video card.

A few days ago I was watching a video on the laptop and something went horribly wrong … the video got completely corrupted.   Even rebooting the system didn’t help.   My initial thought was that my external monitor had gone casters up, so I undocked the system and booted it up.   Video on the laptops display was corrupted too.

Got on another PC and started a chat with Dell hardware support … I was quite surprised that the tech I chatted with quickly picked up on the fact that I was technically competent and didn’t waste my time with each individual mouse click and key press.   He simply said “OK, let’s delete the video adapter from the device manager”.

After we deleted the video adapter and reinstalled the video drivers, the problem seemed to go away.   The tech had me run a few video intensive programs to see if the failure came back.   It didn’t.

Yesterday, however, the problem came back.

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