It's not often I post rants. I don't like to read them. But DELL just chapped my hide! I get to the MVP Summit in Seattle to find that my ethernet port won't connect to the hotel. No link light. Nigel Rivett is kind enough to try his laptop in my room and it worked fine. I haven't installed anything new on my laptop. It worked fine the morning I left. After all the diagnostics failed to turn up anything Dell's first solution was to do a rollback. Amazingly enough that didn't fix it.
There next suggestion was to scrub the machine back to nothing and reinstall the operating system. Oh and they said they don't support two partitions on a machine. If ... after I'd deleted all my data and configurations ... there was still a problem ... then ... it may (MAY!) be a hardware problem. Come on! I've got two operating systems on this computer -- both of them production builds -- and neither of them can see the network card. And they both stopped being able to see it at the exact same time. It's not software. Fix my damn machine. Guess I'll have to try an IBM next time. Fortunately I was able to buy a cheap USB network card just down the street.
Maybe Dell should setup a separate division for people that have a clue about computers. I'd certainly pay a little extra to have someone believe me when I say that I already rebooted. And you're from Dell and you read this I'll be happy to take this post down if you fix my computer :) I can easily be bought.