Stupid laptop:

My shiny, 6-month-old laptop has had some sort of catastrophic failure relating to the video card. Currently, I can sometimes boot into Fedora (sometimes it's unreadable) and never into Windows. I have a feeling that one of the things that they told me to do to try to diagnose the video card problem might have screwed up something else in the system. I got to spend my afternoon on the phone with Dell. Because I'm not located in the US it's even better, let me tell you.

I basically refused to get off the phone with Australian tech support after they told me that I didn't have 24/7 phone coverage (which is false) until they told me that they would have a service tech call me Monday. International tech support in the US will not be open until 8 am Monday CST (which is 1 am Tuesday here), so there is no way of getting the next day service that I paid $400 for. I cannot switch my warranty over to Australia , apparently, though I may try that again and see if I have any luck.

All the people I've dealt with have been polite (and not totally clueless about computers), but ultimately very unhelpful. They seem to want to mail me a video card (though they cannot apparently submit the order until Monday, and I have to call back to do it...um 15 hour time difference and I cannot place international calls from work), but I'm not too happy about replacing something on a laptop motherboard myself. I thought that was the point of the warranty.

I've dragged my 3.5 year old Inspiron that beeps about 25 times at POST every time I turn it on out. Hopefully it will keep working for the week or so that it will take to fix my actual expensive laptop. At least I won't lose any data even if I have to wipe the hard drive. That 40G external hard drive was a good investment!