Dan Folske

February 1, 2010

            Can all computer problems be fixed? Do they need to be fixed?  I’ve been very frustrated lately with a Dell laptop. It started with locking up and sometimes getting a blue error screen. About the time I started working on that I got an email from the state information technology department in Bismarck informing me that this particular computer had a spyware program installed on it that was sending information to another computer somewhere. This is the type of spyware that logs passwords and similar information.

            The computer seemed to be working in Safe Mode so I downloaded MalwareBytes, an anti spyware program. It found a few infected files and cleared them. I ran another full scan with the antivirus program and it came up clean. I rebooted and scanned both the antivirus and the anti spyware program again and MalwareBytes found the same files again but in different locations.  I removed the infected programs and tried to restore the computer to an earlier state. It told me it couldn’t do that because nothing had been changed.  I found that the computer had a support agreement with Dell so I tried to contact Dell Support. The Dell Support chat site kept coming back as unavailable when I clicked on the links so I tried phone support. After 30 minutes on hold I gave up and tried the following Monday. This time I wised up and used a phone with a speaker function so when I was put on hold waiting for a real person I switched to speaker and went on to other tasks. By this time I had decided that the harddrive was probably going to have to be reformatted and all the software reloaded but I would give the Dell experts a chance first. Finally, I got a real tech person on the phone after only holding for 45 minutes! I followed her instructions and gave her remote control of the computer. After two more hours she told me that the operating system would have to be reloaded. She said she would send me out a “Restore Disk” and call back on Friday to help me with it.

            The disk came on Thursday and I started the process Friday morning. When she called I already had the computer working but had three “driver errors” which I had not yet solved. I turned over remote control to her and for the next 3 ½ hours typed in the password when she would have to reboot the computer. By 4:30 pm she had two of those errors fixed but still hadn’t solved the third one. She apologized for the delay and asked if she could call back on Monday! 

             The computer seems to be working fine. The device manager still indicates an “unknown device driver error” but I haven’t found anything that doesn’t work. So now comes the question, “Does it really need to be fixed?”  Maybe when she calls today she will have the solution and can quickly fix it. If she doesn’t should I let her continue working on it? Because of the support agreement the county is not being charged for her time but the computer is not available to be used while it is being worked on. And , it does seem to be working ok. So maybe we should just quit wasting time on it until something happens to help identify the hardware which is causing the problem.

             The Hp laptop which I normally use is also in the repair shop under a service agreement with a hardware issue. It sometimes overheats and shuts down.  After letting it cool, it starts ok and works fine again. Sometimes it will shut down several times in one morning and then again it might work for several weeks without a problem. It had most of the internal hardware replaced in September and went six weeks before it happened again. Is one of the new components bad or is one of the components which wasn’t changed in September causing the problem? This laptop was purchased for the county weedboard through a state grant which required the purchase of a three year extended warranty and service agreement. The extended service agreement and warranty doubled the cost of the computer from $1200 to $2400. The problem occurred when the computer was about 2 ½ years old. It is not costing the county anything to fix it and it looks like I will eventually get back a computer with all new components. The trouble is that it will be a computer with three year old technology. Because computer technology continues to expand so rapidly the $1200 spent for the extended service contract and warranty would have paid for a replacement computer today with a much faster processor, more memory and storage space. Of course, if the problem had occurred two years ago, one day after the factory warranty expired the extended warranty might have seemed like a great deal. Oh well, I guess I’ll have a new old computer that will still do everything it did when it was new. Just not a couple of things I’d like it to do now!