The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 20, 2009

Official News page 2


THE RETURN OF THE DEMI-GODDESS

by Hazed

I'm back!

Ten days without a computer... that was tough. My computer died unexpectedly on Monday almost two weeks ago, when I was in the middle of writing an email. I got the blue screen of death with the message that I had a hardware failure involving a memory parity error, and then nothing. It wouldn't boot up at all.

This happened to coincide with the busiest period of the year for me in my real life job, which was why the Fed2 Star had taken a long break. Last week I was still so busy at work that I didn't have the time or the mental energy to make sensible decisions about what to do with the dead computer. It wasn't till the weekend that I did what I should have done days ago: I dug out the documentation for the computer, discovered it was still in warranty, and phoned up Dell's support line.

I had a "next business day on site service" contract. Unfortunately, the key word there was "business" - the service department didn't operate at weekends. I was told to phone back on Monday.

Finally, after a lot of messing about, they sent an engineer on Wednesday who took about 20 minutes to replace the motherboard, and I got my computer back.

Many thanks to Barb, who spent ages on the phone listening to the nasty music they play while waiting for a response because I was too busy at work to do it, and to Alan who came and computer-sat on Wednesday to wait for the engineer because I had to go to work, and of course Dell couldn't tell us in advance what time of day he would arrive!

Although it seems Dell uses time-travelling technology: we were told he'd be here between 9.30 and 5.00, but they wouldn't be able to phone to narrow that time frame down until 10.30. Hmmm.

Anyway, I have caught up on all my email (5,000-ish emails waiting for me) and replied to everything. If you sent mail to feedback@ibgames.com or to me personally and have not had a reply, your letter may have got swallowed up in all that spam so please send it again - and remember to put Fed2 somewhere in the subject line so it gets filtered out from the junk.


Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page