This Was Not My Chat Tech Experience


I have been having occasional wireless "drop outs" on my laptop here and there. It got to be kind of annoying, so I thought I'd take control contact Dell Support and see if they could fix it.

I used the Chat Support as I've had decent luck with it in the past. This experience had a bit less joy.

It took 6 minutes for the tech to look up my information. I thought they'd be able to download it from my connection somehow, but hey, I was patient.

Next I needed to confirm my problem 3 times. Yep, wireless connectivity issue. Yep. Wireless connectivity. Yes, my wireless.

Then he took control of my computer using web sharing software. He worked his way around, starting with the Dell Diagnostic tool that I could have run. He had me plug the Ethernet cable from our router into the laptop so he could download the driver. Then he decided to uninstall my wireless adapter and downloaded a copy of the latest driver and "installed" it. It was at this point that he said I should be good to go and that he'd check back tomorrow. I said Monday would be better, as I wouldn't be on it much tomorrow. He said how about Tuesday? Fine.

Then we got disconnected.

Forever.

No problem I thought, he said it was fixed. I unplugged the Ethernet cable and...ta da! No wireless. All indications I could find was that the network adapter was "disabled." I tried plugging in the Ethernet cord again and getting back to dell support, but was having issues with that.

Now, if I had more time and wasn't at the end of my rope, I would have looked harder into enabling the adapter or re-installing it myself. Instead I chose to run a Windows "System Restore." I'd heard good and bad about this utility, and so was a bit hesitant to try it. I restored to Wednesday of this week and after a 5 minute wait and a reboot, my computer was working like it used to.

Hallelujah! Something worked for a change.

The whole saga ends this Tuesday when I intend to tell the Technician from a far away place what he did and what I had to do to undo his "did". Because I'm done.

Blogging off...

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