My sister Mary Elizabeth had a huge smile yesterday when she learned her new Dell laptop had been delivered to my office. Her joy quickly faded when we discovered her brand new laptop couldn’t access the internet. It found my Linksys wireless network just fine but only had “Local Access”.
After I used up all my ideas including unplugging the cable modem, router and rebooting I gave her the bad news. You’re going to have to call Dell Support. ::shudder::
I can’t adequately describe our experience with Mark at Dell Support. I only wish I had video taped the experience because it would have been a hit on YouTube. My only chuckle came when the rep told us to click on the Start button and select Run. Oops! There is no more Run option on Vista. This was after he told her she had to plug in an ethernet cable to help configure the system. Even then, this brand new machine needed wasn’t properly configured to find the network without help.
If we had finally resolved the problem I would go into the all the technical steps but there was no solution. Once we did get the hard wire connection established, he had us run a program allowing Dell to connect through a back door and fix things. Unfortunately, the most they could accomplish was a “Limited Access” state but they went away after two minutes and we were back to Local access only. Ultimately, they blamed my router. I think she’s heading to Starbucks today so we’ll see how it does there.
My brother and daughter are both currently shopping for laptops and until today they were going to take the leap toward Dell and Vista. In the past, we’ve had good luck with Dell but those machines all came with an established OS called Windows XP. When we find the solution, I will post it in hopes it might help others.
Update: Click Here for final results
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