Dell Excitement

Well...for the second time in six months, my Dell's motherboard's capacitors were bulging and needed to be replaced. Well, that's the short story. Here's the real *excitement*:

Thursday morning I was just rebuilding my code for a new delivery to clients when my computer just shuts off. Mysteriously, none of the monitors or other powered devices went out. Slowly it dawns on me the pain I'm about to be in. It's happened again. The Optiplex GX270 with an infamous motherboard problem has indeed striked my house again. Well, after I called Dell and they confirmed the issue, a motherboard was sent and delivered Friday morning, not to be installed until Monday afternoon. So I spent half the day Thursday and all day Friday trying to do work while installing the software I need in the background. You never realize the software you use, installation settings, etc. until you have to start fresh. Anyway, painfully Monday comes around. The tech comes, installs the motherboard, but it doesn't even post. He says it's probably the power supply and leaves. (Only the motherboard was under warranty as they had just replaced it six months ago.

So I needed a power supply. I looked up a few power supplies and who had them locally and found a sweet deal on a 350-watt power supply from Antec on Circuit City who had it for $50, with the SATA power adapters and everything. The website verified they had one and the store wasn't answering my repeated calls to check, so I just went over. After 10 minutes looking, they couldn't find it even though it showed they had one. Then when he looked again, they didn't have one :( So after 15 more minutes on the phone with the Fort Union store, they found that they had one. I paid for it at the Jordan Landing store so I just had to pick it up at customer service in Fort Union. Or so I thought (you'll see this is a theme "so I thought").

So I drive 15 minutes to Fort Union, wait in line 10 minutes, give them my receipt, and she goes looking for it. She returns saying they don't have one, asked who I spoke with, etc. After calling the Jordan Landing store and the person they talked to at the Fort Union store, they find out he put it 'somewhere that they'd see it, so it'd be quicker for me since I've already waited so long'. After this, they found it quickly (once he told them where to find it), and I left to install the power supply.

So after driving another 15 minutes home (I don't want to think how long this whole process took), I opened up my case and swapped the power supply. The computer wouldn't boot. So I removed all the devices, put my old power supply back in (just power, processor, and nothing else (ram, etc) and it posted. Evidently Dell had sent the motherboard in "Manufacturer mode" and, after 5 to 10 seconds of letting it do its diagnostics, I slowly added each component until I found out a stick of ram had been fried.

When I put my PCI sound card back in, I needed to reinstall the drivers (evidently it was in a different slot). I got online with Dell and couldn't find the drivers, so I found the model # and talked to "Elvis" (not kidding), who pointed me to Intel Chipset Utility, modem drivers, and even asked me at one point if I already had the drivers and needed help installing them. So after another wasted 20 minutes, I called Dell support, and after five minutes had the answers and the drivers downloaded and installed.

Can you imagine putting your own computer together and not having the online and phone support you need when you need it?