mcbeen.com

DPReview has an interesting article today about a news lens tech. I still don’t fully understand what they are doing, but it looks like an active/dynamic lens. Their description leads me to believe it’s transmition rate is not wonderful.

I got THREE customer surveys in the mail today. JOY! Apple, dell, Veritas… Where to begin. Lets start with dell shall we? I rated the overall call highly, but added this in the comments:

Tech support most of the time is very knowledgeable. The problem is getting anything fixed. I’m treated as though my problem does not matter, or that they simply cannot authorize repair even though I am under warrantee. To add on top of it, most of the time I get used/broken parts that make the problem worse. I buy a new machine, and then when I get a problem a week later, I get used parts. Why would I want to be given parts that failed for someone else? It would be different if I was out of warrantee and was paying on my own dime. In my cases I find it extremely insulting. I have stopped using Dell service parts because of failures after repair. Most parts fail within months after installation. I will not purchase from Dell in the future, and I highly recommend that others avoid them as well until these issues are corrected.

Veritas was a little different because while they are very helpful on things they understand, they are evasive on issues they do not. I still have yet to get satisfaction on my issue related to cataloging my tapes… after being told to delete my catalogs. They have not seen the issue before, and have been slow to admit they have no idea what to do about it. I hated them neutral

Apple was a perfect example of how to handle tech support. I called them as you know about my dead iPod. They referred me to the RMA site for iPods. I filled out the paperwork. They mailed me a box. I mailed it back. Then I waited… About 5 days after I sent it in I got confirmation of receipt. Then I got notification of work. Then I was told a new unit was being ordered. That was last Thursday. Today, I have a brand spanking new iPod. Beautiful. I then receive a survey. Pretty sweet. This is how dell USED to be and how HP is TODAY.

I have yet to have a problem with HP/Compaq tech support. Considering how often I call them it is amazing. Server, Network, PDA, Desktop support is all good with them. I don’t know about consumer though. Never tried that line.

So, I called up dell to complain about the part they sent me. I am sill very concerned about the condition of the replacement drive they sent me. Their explanation was rather odd.

You see, there was this lawsuit relating to warrantee repair. Some guy was sent parts that were supposed to be new, but he felt they were not ‘new’ because they had set on the shelf for a while. So now we label everything as refurbished.

This might have held water, except for a few facts. The drive supposedly came direct from the manufacturer, but it was not sealed in plastic or enclosed in a static shielding bag. The drive was dusty, and showed physical signs of use.

dell swears up and down that they do not send out parts that have not been recertified by the manufacturer. I might be a little more understanding if this same thing had not been going on for years now. This company needs to wake up and stop cheating and lying to its customers. If I had the authority here, I would get an attorney. So far my employer does not want to deal with it. At least we stopped purchasing from them.

As of today, the drive is still online.

Speaking of Dell… I had a hard disk crash in one of our 2600’s yesterday. Actually, I just discovered it yesterday. For some reason I was not alerted to the problem so I’ll have to look in to that later. The drive really failed a couple days ago. It was late in the afternoon, but I decided to call it in anyways. The server was critical to operations, and it was better to get things moving on the support end. Leaving a RAID 5 Array in degraded mode is never a good idea. I called up and got a guy named Carlos who spoke good English and was technically knowledgeable. Cool! He asked if I had reseated the drive. I told him that I had not because different vendors have different policies about that. He asked me to try and manually rebuild the drive, which immediately failed. He then had me reseat the drive, which immediately failed. I thought we were in good shape for replacement… but no. “It could be the backplane of something… maybe the controller”, he said.

Now for me, there was a simple solution. Send both. I don’t really care if the problem cannot be pin pointed. They can do that in their labs with test equipment if they really want to know. I just want my drive fixed.

I offered to look into the logs to see if there was an event there, and sure enough, there was. Luckily it turned the call around, and he offered to send me a replacement drive. Considering it was 5 pm, and the weather was hideous, I could not see them making it that evening. He assured me they would, and I went home for dinner.

I was quite shocked to get a call about 7:30 telling me that the courier had arrived. I drove into the office, pulled the failed drive out of the server and opened the box. Uh… what the hell? They sent me a bare drive. Servers use hot swap rails and cages for their drives. This means I have to swap the rails from one drive to the other… except for a small problem… the new drive is BIGGER than the old, and does not fit properly.

After staring at the drive for a few moments… I notice that there is a bright orange sticker on the side of the drive shipping box… “REFERBISHED” You have got to be kidding me. They sent me a USED drive for a server?!?! That has already FAILED for someone!!! Perfect. After applying much more pressure than I was comfortable with, I got the rails to accept the replacement drive. I was afraid it would not fit in the server, but it slid in fine. I then sat and watched with trepidation as the server attempted to rebuild the array with the new drive.
It took about 2 and a half hours, but the rebuild completed, and the array is now back online. I’m not sure what to do at this point. We are virtually guaranteed a double drive failure in this array in the future.

So… My new iPod is on the way. I have been watching the repair site, and was suprised to see that Apple was actually manufacturing me a new iPod. Cool. Dell could learn a lot from this.

Well. My iPod looks as though it lost it’s battery. Not so good. It’s almost exactly 60 days old. Luckily I’m within warentee. We’ll see how the process goes. A box is on the way for warentee service.

I’ll start this off with some background. I have owned three iPods. I bought the first of the first gen when they came out. I was still happy with it when my wife go it in the divorce. The battery was still working well after almost three years of use. The nthen got a shuffle and then a second gen mini a few months back. The shuffle was great, but it did not have an internal clock…

The mini has been a really nice gadget. The battery life has been great, the screen is wonderful, the size is acceptable. Then something happened. I still don’t really understand what. On tuesday, the unit stopped “charging”. I don’t know how else to describe it. I left the thing plugged in all night, but it never showed a complete charge. The next morning, I started listening, and got a low battery error. I plugged it back in, worrying that my battery might have died. It still never showed a complete charge. The next day, I took it and reset it after it shut down. The battery indicator showed empty, but then slowly started to fill, and then actually got up to almost 70%. After a few hours of playback, it again showed the low battery error. I reset it again, and am still listening to it without charging tonight, four days later. The battery has showed empty for at least the last six hours of play time. I fugure I’ll plug it in to charge after it will no longer boot.

It almost looks like there is a history function that got confused. I do have a charging dock in my car that it gets dropped into regularly. I’ll be in touch.