It used to be so good.

Well, my media center went down hard yesterday. I have a Dell Dimension 1505, and I've generally been happy with it. For a while last year, I was having some issues where XP would blue screen, and I would have to reset my CMOS (through a jumper of all ways) to get it back. That went on for a little while, but it doesn't happen anymore (I don't totally remember what I did to fix it). Well, since then, I've upgraded to Vista home premium (which I love), and I've been good for a while.

Last night, Mary sent me a text message that the media center wouldn't reboot. I guess it rebooted once with a BIOS message (she didn't write it down), then it wouldn't boot again; it powers up, beeps, then sits there frozen with the 1 2 3 lights on. No video, no nothing. Time to get troubleshooting.

First, the manual that I downloaded from the Dell site says the following for these lights:

"Another failure has occurred.

• Ensure that the cables are properly connected to the system board from the hard drive, CD drive, and DVD drive."
• (other statements that imply that the system actually makes it partially through the boot sequence, which mine doesn't)

So, I open it up, reconnect the cables for the hard drive and DVD drive, still nothing. I fooled around with the cables a bit and at least got what appeared to be a bit farther in the initial diagnostic lights sequence; it appeared to settle on 2 3 for a while, then jumped to 1 2 3. 2 3 is a hard drive failure, and it says to reseat the cables, etc. Great.

I do all that, even try connecting an old drive up to the SATA cable, and it still doesn't work; it just sits there at 1 2 3.

Let's call Dell. I usually tell people that I'm very happy with Dell's phone support. The online chat sucks something fierce, as the people on the other end are clearly sitting in India with a script that they follow and most of the times I've been on there, they absolutely will not veer from their scripted steps to troubleshoot. Bad news. So, I skipped the online chat and went straight to the phone.

Well, I'm now about 3 hours into my joyous hold experience. I sat on hold initially for long enough to drain the battery on my phone (I'm betting it was around an hour of continuous use), then I had to plug it in and call back. After another hour, I got to a person. She read through her script, got some information (a couple bits of information was asked for a couple times), then said that she couldn't help me, but she would transfer me to the support line. "It might be a couple minutes," she told me. Well, I sat on that for another hour, at least. I sat and played my guitar (working on My, My, Hey, Hey) while the hold music came and went. Every so often, the line would go dead, and I'd yell out "hello," hoping that someone was on the line. No luck. So, I sat and sat, played my guitar, played my guitar, yawn.

It is now 1.40pm, and I finally got a technician (native english speaker), and had had me hook up a monitor (I have this connected to my television). As these things go, hooking up the monitor fixed everything, so I booted up and everything was fine. Talk about egg on my face. In any case, I don't try to sound like I know anything when I'm talking to the support people, so it isn't like I was an arrogant "I know what I'm doing" person. Oh well, things are working again.

However, the point of this is the fact that Dell support has gone WAY downhill. I literally waited more than three hours to hear a voice that could help me. UGH!