Dell repair adventure, day 5, with updates

Since our last episode, our hero has been communicating with Bob Pearson, Dell's VP of Communities & Conversations, and Bill Bivin, Dell's Community Liaison, about getting my Dell Lattitude D620 back up and running. Both Bob and Bill give every impression of trying very hard to deal not only with my issues, but with issues faced by others. I have to give them high marks for trying.

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It appears that Dell is facing a well-publicized set of issues revolving around failures of nvidia chipset-based motherboards. My system shows all of the symptoms of this problem. So, Dell found itself in the unenviable position of consuming motherboard spare parts at a surprising, atypical level.

This, of course, means that those individuals suffering from this problem are facing a wait for spare parts regardless of Dell's intentions or desires to offer good support.

I understand that Dell has put pressure on their suppliers to step up the the problem and help resolve them. Having been part of Digital Equipment Corporation's product management team for Intel/Linux based servers and RISC/UNIX based servers, I've personally experienced that challenge and feel compassion for the folks at Dell.

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Understanding their issues doesn't change the fact that my primary production machine is off line and some critical data has been hard to access. I must point out that everything on that machine has been backed up on my file server. Kusnetzy Group projects are on time. I've been able to post here every day. It's just that data contained within Microsoft Outlook's PST files aren't very easy to access using standard tools on either Mac OS X or Linux. This has caused me to do some dancing when trying to find conference line numbers and access codes for scheduled client meeting and supplier briefings.

Bill Bivin and I have had several friendly conversations about what Dell is doing. I guess he's been pushing some buttons back there in Dell Land because I got an Email message last night saying that the part has been processed and shipped!

If it arrives at the local service rep's door today and the repair is scheduled for tomorrow, life would be beautiful once again.

Since I'm heading off to the Citrix event next week and the VMware event the following week, if there is any sort of delay, my system won't be repaired until the last week of September. Considering the fact that the issue was brought to Dell's attention in late August, the time to repair would be absolutely awful in anyone's book. When one considers that the system is under a "next day, onsite"support contract, it would represent something even worse.

I'm hoping for the best, but prepared for the worst. I'll let you know what happens next.

10 AM Update

I received a telephone call from an industrial sorcerer from Qualxserv, one of Dell’s service contractors, (see Day 10 of the old coffee-in-the-keyboard trick for his last appearance). It appears that the parts have arrived and he wanted to schedule a visit to perform his magic on the machine. I'll let you know how it goes.

1 PM Update

Steve arrived when expected. He brought a large box from Dell that contained a new screen and a new motherboard. As the sulfurous smelling smoke began to fill my office,  I knew some powerful magic was being performed in the other room.  When I peeked around the corner, he had the laptop on the table, was chanting something in an unfamiliar language and was waving a bag of chicken bones over the machine. It coughed and the screen lit up. It appears that the system is working once again.