Enough politics, let's diss tech support

I've been fighting a battle for the past week, brought on by the ludicrous tech support at Wildblue Satellite. Since I live out in the boonies, my only viable option is Wildblue and I have been very happy with them for almost a year. But a week ago, my email died. I called and was told I needed to go online and chat with a knowledgeable tech rep.

Having done this with Dell (out of desperation since I understand typed English much better than spoken English with an Indian accent), I figured this was probably better. Big mistake. While not in the guru league, particularly in the high speed internet area, I have worked with computers since the original XT (yes, 2 360K floppies and 256K RAM) and all MS Oses since DOS 2.11. So I should have known better than to do what she told me to do. My bad! Upshot was a reinstall, the first in over six months, which is a record for me.

Now I had all of my drivers backed up, I thought. And all were, with the exception of the on board audio for my Dell XPS 410 which needs a Sigmatel driver. With all the finger pointing, I can't figure out who fucked up, Sigmatel, IDT, Dell or Microsoft. But I got no audio now. I did finally get Wildblue to admit I had been locked out of my email account for "excess" activity. Obviously, someone spoofed my address to spam a bunch of folks. Got that fixed but still no audio.

Trying to make sense of Dell's website is like trying to figure out the rules for cricket without an Englishman handy or for baseball without one of us Yanks around. Can't be done. I know my machine is a DXP061. But the most recent Dell driver for a DXP061 is for an Optiplex and won't install on the XPS. I finally figured out it must be a Vista driver and I have XP. But Dell doesn't tell me that, I just inferred it. Love that word, inferred. Makes me sound intelligent.

So I go back to a 2006 driver from Dell. Hell, this is older than my previous Dell, much less this one. What kind of deal is this!!! BTW, Mr. Ed Bott, in his May 9 post on this exact matter http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1965 fails to mention if this driver is for XP or Vista. Knowing Ed is a Vista man, I should have assumed Vista. My bad, again!

So, anyway, I get it working and start the laborious reinstall of all the apps. Guess what?? A week into this, a BSOD! No idea of why. Mickeysoft's idea of a helpful screen isn't mine. Googled it on my laptop and guess what? I have a driver problem. No shit. Try system restore. It tells me it can't restore. Try another restore point with same result. After three more tries with the same result, I say Clusterfuck and reinstall again. Now, I got no audio again and the 2006 driver doesn't fix the problem. So here I am, with no audio. But I got email! This is a FUBAR SNAFU if I ever saw one.

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