MY COMPUTER NIGHTMARE
MY COMPUTER NIGHTMARE
In October of 95 my (then)fiance and I decided to buy a computer, as much for our daughter's sake as our own. We bought a copy of Computer Shopper and spent lots of time narrowing it down to the best choice for our needs: a system from a company in California. This company sported glowing endorsements from the likes of PC Magazine(Editor's Choice), Computer Life, etc. We ordered it, and in a few weeks it came(after a major snafu with UPS: we went to Utica to pick it up, but (oops!) it was in Syracuse). So we get it home, set it up, and it's cool for a while. Then we start having GPFs--no big deal. What WAS a big deal was when, one day, we turned it on and it froze on the Win 95 startup screen. We turned it on and off again lots of times, but no dice: total system crash. We get on the phone to the company's tech support and the tech tells Meg that they had had problems with that hard drive; "It's defective--Send it in and we'll send you a new one." So we spend $40 to have it shipped back to California. They get it, and call us to say that when they got it the RAM chips were missing!! So we're freaking out and trying to figure out how these suckers are going to be replaced, and we practically had to BEG the people at the company to hold it for UPS to inspect it. Throughout this whole ordeal the employees were inept and rude. For example, they acted as though we were idiots for sending the tower back when we should have just sent the hard drive. Like I know how to take the hard drive out. Not to mention the tech said to send it back in the original box, which is huge. Anyway, after a week of UPS getting its head out of its ass, they finally show up and, of course, say that no way could one of their people could have done it. And of course the people at the company say the same thing. There didn't seem to be anything we could do, so we had 'em ship it back, reformatted, without the RAM. (oh, incidentally: The hard drive WASN'T defective; the data had somehow become corrupted. And the service guy we talked to said that none of the tech support people would have EVER said over the phone that it was defective, since such a diagnosis would require an examination. Oh, so I guess it was our imagination.)
While the computer is en route, I shelled out $300 for a new 8 Meg RAM chip to replace the original RAM. The computer shows up, we pop the chip in and turn it on, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS! At this point, we're losing our #^&*@!~% minds. We call tech support again and THEN find out that the RAM was originally in the form of two 4 Meg chips, and that two of the 4 SIMM slots need to be filled for the computer to function. Wonderful. So I take it back to have another 4 Meg chip put in, only to find out that they have to be installed in matching pairs. So I end up spending ANOTHER $300 for a second 8 Meg chip. Once again we get it home and turn it on. OK, it's working, but...no sound or video. The schmucks installed Win 95 but didn't bother to install the sound and video drivers. So we start to install them from the original floppies, and while installing the third disk THE SYSTEM TOTALLY CRASHES!!! By this time we're way past the point of losing our #^&@!~% minds. We were literally ready to give up on it, or spend the money to have it serviced locally. But we decided to give tech support one more try and, wonder of wonders, they actually helped us. We had answered "Y" to "Do you have Windows...?" during one of the installation procedures. It caused the system to crash because it defaults to Win 3x; since we had Win 95 we should have answered "N". So the tech led us through reformatting the hard drive over the phone(which means they could have done that when the very first problem occurred!), and since then it's worked tolerably well.
Moral of the story: BUY LOCAL!!!!! Or if you don't, for god's sake check with the area Chamber Of Commerce first. We did so after the nightmare started, and found out that the company had a lousy rep.
monteverdi@geocities.com
