Reinstalling a Dell Laptop

Helping Qian get rid of the Windows XP Home Edition on her Dell Inspiron 6000 Laptop and replacing it with a more powerful and secure Professional Edition has been in my TO-DO list since the laptop was bought in April last year. For a computer geek like me, installing such a dumb operation system like Windows XP Pro is like nothing but a teeny-tiny piece of cake. However, this small piece of cake winded up being a super huge fatty pizza that took me almost two days to swallow.

 

So, why this laptop came in with a "Home" edition? Well, the truth is we are poor students. If there is any possibility that could save our money, we will just do it. This machine was bought in last April when there was a super HOT sale from Dell going on. Applying numerous rebates, discounts, and my savvy configurations (yep, I am extremely good at that), I managed to cut the price of the machine to less than $700. Among those savvy configurations, not choosing XP Pro was one of them. This item alone saved us 50 bucks! Plus, using the education agreement between Microsoft and Virginia Tech, I can download an XP Pro for FREE in a totally LEGAL way. Cool, huh? If I were asked to name a list for the Top 10 Money Saving Tips in America, DIY (Do It Yourself) would be definitely in. I have seen so many omnipotent people who could do virtually any household thing, even like growing vegetables (maybe someday I can write another blog entry on this). I am not so talented as they are, but dealing with computers is my expertise. Also, it is said that "Guys are useful only in fixing stuff." So there I was, so proud of taking this job.

 

This Dell laptop is quite a fancy one, equipped with an Intel Pentium M 725 Processor (1.60GHz/2MB Cache) plus internal wireless, 512MB Memory, 15.4” Widescreen TFT Active-Matrix Display (resolution up to 1680×1050), 64MB ATI Mobility RADEON X300 Graphics, and 60GB hard drive. Unfortunately, the more fancy the machine is, the more drivers it needs, which in turn means it’s more likely that the original Windows XP Pro won’t support these fancy devices. Just as what I expected, the machine looked so ugly when it loaded XP Pro for the first time: no sound, no wireless network, very low display resolution, 4:3 screen stretching to 16:9, and tons of devices unrecognized under the device manager. A computer expert like me, though, will never be intimidated by these small problems. After the installation of drivers downloaded from Dell, all devices on the machine worked perfectly and the machine looked fabulous.

 

Oh…wait. There was still one more important step to do — Activating the Windows XP. Without doing so, my XP Pro would be locked up in 30 days. As you may know, activation is a notorious method Microsoft takes for piracy protection. However, this stupid thing doesn’t stop any pirate copy, but add way too much trouble to people like me who use authorized products. Anyway, just like what Ennis said in Brokeback Mountain, "If you can’t fix it, you got to stand it."

 

I connected to the activation website shown on the activation wizard. Surprisingly, the returned page said "Your product key has already exceeded the maximum number of activations. If you are using authorized Microsoft products, please call 1-800-xxx-xxxx for additional product keys." So I could do nothing but frustratedly follow these Microsoft’s rules and dial this damned number. After a short while, my call was put through and very gentle female, No, a very gentle automated voice machine, was heard. "Thanks for calling Microsoft, I can help you activate your Windows XP. Please read the installation ID to me. "Fine, everything you want me to do, I do it for you!", I was murmuring to myself. "Sorry, I could not understand you, please read the installation ID to me." The gentle female machine was heard again, and at the moment I realized that it was useless to complain to a machine, be it sounding like a female or male. So I began to read the installation ID shown on screen, which is divided in 10 groups, and each group contains 6 characters! Fortunately though, my pronunciation doesn’t carry too much Chinese accent, and the gentle female machine was able to recognize all what I said. But at the end, again, the female machine told me in her unique gentle voice, "Sorry, your installation ID was not found, please hold while we’re transferring you to our customer support representatives. This call may be recorded for quality assurance and training purposes…blah blah blah…" and then, the music started to play.

 

"What the hell is this?! How dare you tell me the 60-character ID you generated by yourself was not found?" I was completely pissed off. The music kept playing until 3 minutes later when the gentle female voice was heard again, "Sorry, our customer representatives are experiencing high call volume. Your call is very important to us, please continue to hold…" I looked at my watch, which showed it was 9:30pm on a Saturday night. If what the female machine said was true, then Microsoft’s products really suck big time! Three minutes passed, another three minutes passed… After the gentle female machine soothed me NINE times, my call finally got through.

 

This time, a not-very-gentle female with Indian accent was heard. Alright, now I understand why it took so long for them to pick up my call. The reason was that my call traveled through half of the Earth before finally hitting a Microsoft customer representative in India!!! Anyway, I was really feeling lucky that I can eventually talk to a real person. However, this time it was the Indian accent starting to give me troubles. No offense to Indian people (I have a lot of Indian friends at Tech), I REALY have difficulty in understanding their English even when talking face to face, not to mention on a phone call. After several minutes’ ineffective communication, in which I was trying to explain what product I was using and what happened to my machine, I can only understand one word from her, "Sir, I have no information for your product, contact your university for license help!", which sounded quite rude by the way.

 

Hanging up the phone furiously, I clicked, No, PUNCHED the "Activate" button on screen again to let out my angry. Suddenly, several words popped up and said, "Your Windows XP has been successfully activated!" Seriously, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I am not a guy who believes in miracle, so I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t in dream. Ladies and gentlemen, this is our lovely Microsoft, who came up with this "smart" activation system.

 

 (The bottle reads, "We suck more! and that’s guaranteed.")

 

However, when I thought the dust was about to settle, another nightmare was just getting started. Soon, I found a very bizarre problem: I couldn’t maintain a stable access to the Internet with my wireless connection! What the hell was going on? My internal wireless device seemed functioning well, I got full bars of the signal, I had a correctly assigned IP address, I was able to "ping" through my gateway (in fact I was able to successfully ping through whichever website if it exists), DNS was okay, everything else looked fine. But the problem is I just couldn’t maintain a stable access! I can visit some websites successfully for a couple times, but all of a sudden, Bang! an empty page showed up in IE, saying that "The webpage is not available…tada tada…". The only thing I can do was to reconnect to my wireless router again, but after several successful access attempts, the whole thing repeated and I could visit nowhere again. This was probably the weirdest problem I had ever met. I forgot how many commands like "netsh", "ipconfig", "arp" I had typed that night, trying every possible trick that I know to tackle this problem. However, the networking problem still remained at the end of the day. So I had to sleep with the job undone because it was already past midnight.

 

The ensuing morning, I got up early and worked on it again. Struggling three hours and having no improvement at all, I finally admitted that this wasn’t a problem I can fix. So I called Dell’s technical support. You know what, if there exists a ranking for worst phone call support systems, I may rank Microsoft No. 5 or No.6, but would definitely rank Dell as No.1 of all-time worst!! I was hanging in there waiting for almost one hour before someone picked up my call. Dell is so lazy that they wouldn’t bother to set up background music. The call was completely silent, with a not-gentle-at-all female machine saying "Please continue to hold" once in a while, reminding me that my call was still alive. After I finished describing my machine’s problem, the Indian (yes, again) gentlemen said, "Sorry, Mr. Liu, this is the department for Dell Desktop PCs. I will transfer you to our Notebook department." "Wait, could you please tell me…" I wanted to ask him if he could give me the number of their Notebook department just in case my connection got lost. But it was a little too late, and my call became silent again.

 

So there I was, roaming through their Desktop Department, Notebook Software Department, Re-format and Installation Department, Wireless Department, and, again!, Desktop Department, talking to different people but all from the same place — India. Every time I had to repeat the same information to them: my name, my address, my phone number, and my machine’s service tag number. Likewise, they all did nothing but transferring me to yet another department. Two hours later, no one really started to look into the problem. I became so numb that I even forgot to make myself angry. Fortunately, my perseverance finally got paid off. A person from the Wireless Department picked up my call, and thank god, he sounded like an experienced person who knows how to tackle the problem. This technical support is from Pennsylvania, he sounds like a Native American. For political correctness sake, I need to clarify that I have NO the least discrimination to Indian people. But it happened to me that this guy from Pennsylvania is much more helpful.

 

The Penn guy worked with me to examine every possible wireless networking configuration. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find any mistakes after two hours’ tweaking as well. Finally, he asked me one very useful question, "What’s the installation order of the drivers you installed?" "I couldn’t recall. But it seems to me that no such order is required." I replied him. "Well, there certainly is. But most people don’t know. Every time when we install drivers, we always follow the following order: 1) Dell System Software, 2) Intel Mobile Chipset, 3) PCMCIA driver (if any), 4) Video driver, 5) Audio driver, 6) Modem driver, 7) Ethernet driver, and last, 8) Intel PRO/Wireless drivers." I told him that although I couldn’t recall what my installation order was, but the wireless driver wasn’t the last one for sure.

 

"Well, you got to follow the correct order, man." he said once again.

 

"Alright, if the installation order is so important, why didn’t you guys put this information on your website??" I asked.

 

"Oh, That’s…that’s…uh…that was really our fault." he said awkwardly.

 

Following the correct order, I finally ended this energy-consuming and time-consuming drama.

 

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PS. This blog entry is long overdue. I should’ve been able to finish it earlier. But every time when I was trying to finish it in one shot, something always came up. Also, I was getting busy lately. So writing this entry ends up being as painful as installing the machine. But I really appreciate all of you who are patient enough to read thus far.