Dells really suck balls

Most of you who are in the IT support probably already know that my subject heading is pretty much true. I've worked in IT support for a number of years now and there isn't a Dell model I haven't hated or experienced trouble with. The newer Dell business desktops are somewhat cumbersome and the notebooks just outright stink!

Now, on to a short story. Last night out of the kindness of my heart, I went to the wife's office because her co-worker couldn't get their monitor to work. Being the good former technician that I am, I bring along my laptop and my bag of goodies just in case I need it. I go over there and hook up the monitor to the old laptop since I use dual displays and I'm set up for it. Presto it works on my laptop so its not the monitor. Just to be sure I hook up the old CRT. The settings are set up in the most basic configuration (800x600 with 256 colors, who the hell uses that anymore?) because thats what their tech guy told them to do in order to get the monitor working. Well whatever......... So I play around with the display controls, hook up the new LCD and wham, it works! I reboot the PC a couple of times just to be sure it's working alright. All of a sudden it says that some DLL file in Windows is corrupt or missing. Well doesn't that suck ass right there.

I know that he needs the file, I know how I would normally load the file using a floppy and booting with a Win 95 boot disk that I have in my car so I figure, no biggie I can copy it from someone else's PC and load it. I go down to my car and when I return he's gone home already. WTF! Next when I'm looking at the PC I notice that something is missing, why it has no freakin floppy drive! WTF?!?!?! Any tech worth his salt always needs a floppy drive because its the fastest way to do things and sometimes you just need a good ole boot disk to get things going again but for some reason Dell didn't include one on this model. Since I had my bag of goodies and there's no restore disc in sight, I use my old Win XP Pro disc and start to repair the sucker. Now the one problem with this is that it takes about 40 minutes to get this POS running if I do a repair job. I get up to the part to attach the PC to the domain and it just hangs there, now this pisses me off since I have to reboot the PC and try again. I do this about 3 times till I get fed up and just say install as a stand alone since I can make it join a domain later anyway. After I do that, it goes by pretty fast and then it reboots itself and wham! It's ALIVE! Afterwards just to be on the safe side I reboot it a few more times and check to make sure all the drive mappings work out ok (which they do I might add) so I leave with the wife to go relax. At this point we've been there for about 2 hours trying to get this POS Dell to work.

This morning my lovely wife sends me a message that her co-worker thinks I broke his PC because MS Office no longer works. Now how the hell is that my fault? I didn't even touch office and my techie friend up in NY agrees that my repair should not have affected his programs in any way. Besides, it's not like I'm their tech support and I'm not just going to launch programs just for the hell of it or anything. I didn't even get so much as a thank you, he actually had the balls to question if I knew what I was doing last night. If I know how to crack open the case and check the connections of the video card and he doesn't, I think I know what I'm doing since I worked as a tech for 2 years and I still tinker with my own PC. Some of it isn't his fault since the design of the PC is TERRIBLE but since I'm getting shit for "supposedly" corrupting MS Office he is now on my shit list forever (not to mention he's a terrible bowler).