I had a user setting up his notebook at the last second in a conference room full of expectant visitors. When his notebook wouldn’t connect to the room’s built-in projector it seems that he went and grabbed our nice Dell portable projector. When that didn’t work and the meeting was two minutes overdue to start, they finally came running to me.
Unfortunately, this left me with no time to help him with the problem he was having with connecting to external displays. The only thing I could do was grab a spare Dell notebook on the way out of my office and have him copy his presentations to it so he could continue on with the meeting. Problem not solved but crisis averted.
Today he tells me that he’s leaving on the weekend for a week and he needs that functionality to work and he won’t be able to let Dell have the laptop before then to fix it. Uhh…. So I dredged through my rusty databank of a mind and remembered that I kept seeing a little graphic pop-up each time he hit Fn+F8 and it said “Presentation Mode: OFF.” I remember thinking that that wasn’t right but couldn’t troubleshoot it at the time.
I contacted Dell Support and of course they can’t do much without me having the PC in front of me, but they did give me a hint that I thought might work. There’s a Dell QuickSet application that runs in the background and gives some control over certain system settings and functions. So I got the PC for a few minutes and checked QuickSet and sure enough, there’s a Display setting that, if unchecked, will not allow you to use external displays. Presentation Mode was indeed turned off.
So I checked the box to enable Presentation Mode and tested it with an external LCD monitor and a HD Plasma TV in the conference room. Imagine that… it works now. Not so hard of a fix after all. But how did it get set like that in the first place? That I can’t answer… yet. I have two new D630s sitting here in my office though and I intend to see what their default settings are on this.
So that’s the first tech tip for today. The second one is more of a common sense tip that should be obvious after reading the above. If you need help with your PC, please… for the love of all that’s silicon, give us technical people a little time to fix your problem. Asking for help at the last possible second is the worst time to do so. Especially when you knew the problem existed previously.
I… I am weak. I’ve reactivated my World of Warcraft account. After almost a year of not playing, I finally got drawn back in. Well, Yoshi had a lot to do with that. He’s evil like that. He’s such an enabler. And now I’m trying to get Muse to re-activate her account. *sigh*
I know I make it sound bad but its really not. It’s just what seems to be expected when someone admits that they are getting back into an online game that they used to play. I don’t see it as a weakness or an evil in the least. It’s just a game. It can be a bit addictive at times and it certainly is a time sink, but it’s really no worse than spending hours playing “casual” games from PopCap or Reflexive. I would just as easily spend 3 hours playing Peggle as I would Warcraft.
Anyway, if you are playing WoW and are on the Lothar server, leave a comment with your character name and I’ll see if I can find you. However, if you play one of those evil, under-handed Alliance then I may have to try and hurt you. Fair warning.
Dealing with technical support at the best of times can be difficult. Dealing with tech support in Hong Kong can be absolutely infuriating. The DVD-RW drive in my Dell XPS M1710 computer has been slowly dying for months but Friday it decided to give up completely. This is a pretty fast PC but it would take six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD because it reset every two seconds. Now it won’t even read a disk.
In a nutshell, here’s how the conversation went:
“My computer’s broke.”
“No it’s not, that’s normal.”
Yes tech support in Hong Kong will regularly flat out lie to try and keep from actually sending someone to fix something. It’s not just Dell or even computers. Getting service in Hong Kong is painful.
Actually the Dell Optiplex support line is pretty good and they speak English. When you call the Dell XPS support line, you get transferred to Mainland China somewhere and they don’t speak English. Knowing this, I had an admin make the call for me and warned her that they may not even speak guangdong hua (Cantonese).
Sure enough, the first person to answer speaks putong hua (Mandarin) only. Luckily most of the local staff in my office are at least able to handle most conversations in Mandarin but they still get mixed up sometimes. Oddly enough, the tech must not have liked the admin’s knowledge of his language because he hung up on her. So she called back and luckily this time she got someone who speaks Cantonese. Mind you, this is a Hong Kong phone number we’re dialing.
Instead of going through all the details of what happened, I’ll just give you the excuses that were translated to me. There may have been more that I didn’t hear or understand.
- “Has Windows been re-installed?” – This insinuated that it’s not the drive but that Windows is the problem and needs to be re-installed. No.
- When the call was made I had a burned copy of Symantec AV in the drive. He told the admin that “there was just an incompatibility in the way that the burned disk had been created.” So he told her she needed to put in a CD provided by Dell and if it worked then it wasn’t their problem.
- So I put in the XPS Drivers and Utilities Disk. Standing near the PC you can hear the drive spin and reset over and over and over. I told her to tell him about that noise. He responded with: “That’s normal.”
- When the Dell CD didn’t come up, he had her try another Dell CD because it must be a problem with that CD. We entered another one which made the same sounds and didn’t work. He told her “the drivers weren’t loaded” even though we told him it’s been working for almost two years. He had her check Device Manager and sure enough there was no Exclamation Point marking a problem.
- When I told her to tell him it took six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD-R, he started questioning the software we were using and blamed it on that. He told her then that “the software you use is just not updated.” By this point I was well beyond pissed and glad he couldn’t understand what I was saying on speakerphone.
The admin started getting confrontational with him at that point because he was wasting our time. We had spent 30 minutes on the phone at that point. Finally he relented and told us someone would contact us tomorrow to replace the drive.
Of course I thanked the admin since I’ve made similar calls before and they were just as painful except neither person understood the other. Imagine trying to convey “video card” to someone who only speaks Mandarin and you only speak English. Painful.
Today has just not been my day so far today. I woke up from a really bizarre and upsetting dream that haunted me for quite a while. Then I drew a funny little obscene cartoon and showed it to Muse. The look on her face was priceless. So that part was good.
Then Muse left me to my own devices to go see a musical with her friend. So I read a comic mini-series and then started going through my downloads to get them sorted for a possible trade later tonight with a friend. So I get bored with the unzipping and file trimming (it’s for DS, if you don’t understand it’s OK) so I decided to look for a script to help me automate the process. I found one. Yay! Happy Day!
Then I do something really stupid. The script adds redundant file extensions to all my files. OK well maybe if I just select all the files and just change the file extension on one it will change them all. BZZZTT!!! WRONG. All the files were changed to the same complete name as the name I edited with a number appended. Yeah. About a hundred and fifty files that I just worked on rendered completely unrecognizable from each other in less than a second. All I could do was laugh.
If I had just thought it through I would have known that would happen. I know how it works but I was in a hurry and screwed up. So I’ll spend the next hour or two fixing the mistakes. Luckily I didn’t SHIFT+DELETE the source files….
Then I took the dogs out because I realized that I was cursing myself and my PC instead of taking care of them. Guinness jumped unexpectedly on me and his leash flew out of my hand and into the sludge caked bottom of what used to be a nasty mud puddle. Gross. The end of the leash was just brown. So I had to take them back holding his leash closer to the middle which is awkward. Then Chinni had to poop. So I picked it up in the little baggy and as I went to close up the bag the side slipped open and the poop fell and splatted against the ground. Which doesn’t really sound or look nice. Or clean up as well as the first time.
Now I’m just sitting here at the PC listening to some calming Beethoven, typing this up while my PC unzips all those files again. I think I’ll try and be a bit more careful this time….
I think there’s something wrong with me. I came across this simple web game called TypeRacer and actually found my competitive nature kicking in and making an otherwise productive day into a keyboard melting experience. And the odd thing is that it’s probably good for me.
The whole idea is that it gives you a paragraph from a book, movie or song that you have to type, accurately, as fast as you can. At the same time, other people are racing against you to type the paragraph faster. Little Volkswagen New Beetles race along the top of the screen to show the progress. The first to complete the paragraph with no mistakes wins. Then you go on to the next race.
The thing is that I nearly flunked my typing class when I was in high school. I’ve gotten better with typing in my computer career but I still make plenty of mistakes. But making typing into an on-line competition? I’m already up to 60 words per minute! Granted that’s in a short burst typing out one paragraph, but still – it’s improvement.
Of course there’s also a leaderboard that shows the fastest typers and obviously there are some robots that play this game too because I don’t hink it’s humanly possible to type at 217 words per minute. Perhaps there’s a cheat like Aimbot for typing or something. Who cares. Try it out.
June 26, 2008 1:28 pm | 
