Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 58

quote:

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Originally posted by GSR13
Now, I am a PDA addict. I admit this. I also admit, that I rarely make a purchase without learning everything I can first. There are so few people in retail that really know technology, I am scared to buy anything based on an associates recommendation.

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Midwest
Posts: 25

Had no problem getting hardware from CompUSA retail, as I always did research ahead of time and no one gave me an argument...

'Cept for one instance. When I purchased my iBook, I wanted AppleCare instead of Comp's own package. The salesguy insisted they didn't have it, and that I'd have to order it direct from Apple.

An Apple rep was on hand to correct him, and teach how to fill in the paperwork.

They were s'posed to FAX it in and I'm supposed to get a snail-mail verification, but there's been nothing yet in a bit over three weeks.

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Get someContent.

Registered: Mar 2001
Location: San Diego, California
Posts: 441

Excuse my ignorance,

But what is AppleCare? (I'm Mac Challenged, guess that happens after 11 years of PC-Only use.)

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Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Twin Cities, MN
Posts: 1683

quote:

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But what is AppleCare? (I'm Mac Challenged, guess that happens after 11 years of PC-Only use.)

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Registered: Mar 2001
Location: San Diego, California
Posts: 441

Makes sense. Thanks.

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You know it's bad when your Calculus Professor uses the word "Unpossible"

"It's a long way from my thoughts to what I'll say, It's a long, long way from paradise to where I am today." -Switchfoot, Home

Registered: Mar 2001
Location: NJ, USA
Posts: 17

Dilbert's Take on Tech Support

Registered: Mar 2001
Location: San Diego, California
Posts: 441

VERY FUNNY! brings back memories of HP Tech Support phone calls.

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You know it's bad when your Calculus Professor uses the word "Unpossible"

"It's a long way from my thoughts to what I'll say, It's a long, long way from paradise to where I am today." -Switchfoot, Home

Registered: Aug 2000
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Posts: 217

That's great. I've actually done that when on the phone with tech support.

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Mike
I'd rather be upside down in my kayak than rightside up at my desk.

Registered: Dec 2000
Location: Elkins Park, Pa
Posts: 577

Ooooo. Dell phone support. Overrated:

Me: there's a noise in my computer. I think it's coming from the power supply box.
Tech: I think it's the video card fan. Take out the video card and turn the computer on.
Me (after doing so): It's still making the noise. It's coming from the power supply box.
Tech: Try unplugging the proccesor's fan.
Me: How?
Tech: There's a cord.
Me (thinking "whatever, that's not it"): Okay. It's still making it.
Tech: I think it's coming from the hard drive. Try unplugging the hard drive.
Me (annoyed, I don't like taking out harddrives): IT'S COMING FROM THE POWER SUPPLY BOX!!!
Tech: I don't think that's it, but I'll send someone over tommarow to put in a new one.

And the next day, someone came and replaced it, and it didn't make the noise ever again.

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"One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is 'to be prepared'.
-Dan Quayle

Registered: Mar 2001
Location: San Diego, California
Posts: 441

I had problems with my DVD drive so I called Dell (basically it wasn't recognizing that anything was even in the drive) they wanted me to reboot my computer using the Dell Diagnostics CD (Umm, yeah, right how's that supposed to work?) so I did anyways and the girl on the phone couldn't figure out why the diagnostics program wouldn't even run off the CD. Go figure.

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You know it's bad when your Calculus Professor uses the word "Unpossible"

"It's a long way from my thoughts to what I'll say, It's a long, long way from paradise to where I am today." -Switchfoot, Home

Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 58

I've been helping a somewhat non-technical friend of mine with his HP Pavillion over the last few weeks - One day he tried to boot his computer and got the dreaded 'Operating System Not Found' message from the boot manager. I twiddled with the BIOS and from what I could tell, the hard drive just wasn't being detected. I did manage to get it to boot once, but it promptly crashed and went back to the 'OS not found' message.

Now, he had several months' of work on this hard disk that hadn't been backed up to anything, and it seemed to me that there was a good chance the problem was with the drive cable or the controller/motherboard; the drive itself hadn't made any of the awful screeching noises a failing drive usually does, and I had gotten it to boot successfully once.

Since the machine was still under warranty, we made a call to HP tech support, who said to insert the recovery CD and reboot. Not surprisingly, the CD couldn't find a hard disk to reinstall to. The tech support guy pronounced that the hard drive had failed, and there would be nothing for it but to send the whole thing back to HP.

Fortunately I was able to establish that removing the hard drive wouldn't void the warranty, so I took the drive out, hooked it up to a machine at home, and sure enough the drive itself was fine - and I was able to salvage all of my friend's work.

The real kicker is that after all of that, he sent the machine off to HP and in about 4 days he received his same tower back, supposedly fixed - and went back to its old tricks within a matter of hours. It makes me wonder what exactly they did with it to 'fix' it. But he got them to send him a complete replacement (which I'm sure is a refurb), so all's well that ends well for now, I guess.

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Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Twin Cities, MN
Posts: 1683

quote:

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Dilbert's Take on Tech Support

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Them Twin Cities
Posts: 1758

quote:

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Originally posted by usonian2001
I've been helping a somewhat non-technical friend of mine with his HP Pavillion over the last few weeks - One day he tried to boot his computer and got the dreaded 'Operating System Not Found' message from the boot manager. I twiddled with the BIOS and from what I could tell, the hard drive just wasn't being detected. I did manage to get it to boot once, but it promptly crashed and went back to the 'OS not found' message.

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What model Pavillion was it. I had the exact same thing happen to me. I, unfortunately, did not have any of my savvy friends on hand, so all I could do was insert the OSD and type FORMAT C: ! While it sucked major big fat #%^$#% to loose 30% of my work for the past few years, it was fun to type out those 7 little characters, hit enter, and then hit "y"!

...oh, and to stay on topic, HP's website tech support sucks a lot. They have a messageboard on there that has been closed down, so far as I can tell, and I had to google-search the whole damn site to find my answer, since their offical answer is only "insert the recovery disk and screw everything else."

Sigh.

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Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 58

quote:

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Originally posted by dietrichbohn
What model Pavillion was it. I had the exact same thing happen to me

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I'm not sure, Dietrich, but he only bought it back in April, which is the real kicker. When the company I worked for a couple of years ago needed some PC's in a hurry they bought the then-top of the line HP Pavillions from the local Best Buy/Good Guys type store, and although they seemed generally junky and crash-prone (even after we replaced Win98 with WinNT) we never had a problem on the level of a hard drive or controller.

Format C: is a fun one. Back when Microsoft introduced the first version of IE 4 with Active Desktop, I foolishly installed it on the Gateway Pentium 166 I had at work at the time. (Remember the earliest versions that couldn't be uninstalled unless you used the utility MS grudgingly released, and even that didn't work half the time?)

Within a few days my system was so messed up that it wouldn't run more than 5 minutes without crashing, and when none of my attempts to fix it worked, I decided to hose the hard drive. I learned a much of what I about Windows configuration and networking from getting that system back up.

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location: Spring Lake Park, MN (45min from minneapolis)
Posts: 313

i mean GOSH WILLY, i check this site once or twice daily, i come home from school i need to read this WHOLE thread. but before we all got knowledge about store associates (like my dad) we still believed every word they say. i found handspring out all by seeing an organizer on tv, so i typed "electronic organizer" on metacrawler and handspring pops up,

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