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This weekend I thought I'd start in earnest on the backgrounds for the dogs-and-moors film I'm making. This meant a rest from the PC screen, which was just as well - since I got the most dreaded error message of all yesterday afternoon - "A drive in a RAID 0 volume is failing. Try to back up data immediately."
I've had this PC for six months, during which time I've spent probably two full days talking to technical support about one thing or another. I thought I was out of the woods when I did a total restore in December - no such luck.
Since Dell's hardware support service is closed at weekends, I called Presto, the software support service based in Ireland, who I also have a well-used subscription with. It's clearly a hardware problem, but they were happy to help anyway, which was cathartic at least. If only their phone system was as dependable - it cut off on me three times as I was waiting for them to pick up, and once at a delicate moment when they were telling me what to do.
They advised running a disk check, which turned out to be a bad idea as it froze in the middle of the process then refused to restart without trying to run the check again. This morning, the Presto techie more or less gave up on it and offered his condolences, but afterwards I got it started on my own by finding a trick he'd missed... so I came away with mixed feelings -to be fair, though, it was a hardware issue so not really their problem. My main issue is with Dell's own hardware support service. After innumerable calls I've found that the technicians are usually very good, but not always... on one occasion, I was asked to run a check then told politely but flatly that everything was working perfectly and to call back if I had any further problems and they would be delighted to help. I hung up in utter bewilderment. Calling again, I got a very helpful lady who confidently talked me through taking the cover off the machine and performing a delicate operation, which did in fact fix the problem. Often, though, I find that communication is somewhat impeded by bad lines, thick accents and a time lag.
But my main grumble about Dell hardware support is that the subscription service for *HOME* users.... is only open during office hours... whose bright idea was that?