Setting up my Dell Inspiron 1420

Update Nov 28th: So finally done the whole works of reformating my laptop and installing all the drivers. I then proceeded to do all the recommended updates for my windows OS. After that was done, my sister rebooted and then I got this constant BLUESCREEN OF DEATH. Like I couldn't get back into windows. One of the stupid windows updates was causing my laptop to fail to boot. UGH!!!!! I hate computers!!! Anyways to solve this, I turned off automatic download and install of window updates, and chose to select which updates to install. So far I've chosen all the important ones aside from the odd windows mail security updates which I didn't bother because I don't use windows mail. I am not sure exactly what is causing this bluescreen of death. But I am installing the updates in separate groups so if one group fails, then the OS can be restored to the last system restore point which can be done by popping in the OS cd and choosing "repair system"

This latest experience with PCs has actually got me contemplating whether I should be getting a "crapintosh." I hate them...but I can't stand this downtime. It's killing me. I have so much work to do.

Getting my replacement hard drive for my Dell has been a complete pain the butt, but I finally got it done. Now the next ignoring part is to reinstall all the drivers/programs. For the first time, I decided to call Dell to get the "correct" way to install everything. So here is a documentation of the steps that I took:

Assuming that the hard drive has been wiped clean of data and we are starting a completely new install of the OS

• Pop in the Dell Media Direct CD and let the computer boot from it. When prompt on the selection, choose the 1st option which is to partition everything to the C: drive and then let it do this. This will create a partition D: which has about 3 GB for the Dell Media Direct which allows you to play movies and DVDs. (Don't really have to do this, but apparently if I don't I won't be able to play DVDs unless I find a decoder.


• After the Dell Media Direct has been installed, pop in the OS and let the system boot from that CD. Follow the instructions until you reach the partition screen. You should see two partitions. One with the Media Direct, and another containing everything else. You delete the one partition that is NOT media direct. You can then choose to re-setup a partition and extend from it. And then choose to have the OS installed at one of the new partitions.
  
  

  The technician told me to delete and then re-setup a partition. I have no idea why we have to do this, but I just followed his advice.



• After the OS is installed, then let the system boot up and pop in the drivers CD.
  Now install these drivers in this order:
  
  

  Always choose to restart later unless specified.

  
  
  
  
  1. Notebook system (under Utilities)
  
  
  2. Intel Chipset Driver
  
  
  3. Rioch
  
  
  4. Video (should be at the bottom)
  
  
  5. Restart the computer now
  
  
  6. Audio
  
  
  7. Webcam
  
  
  8. Touchpad
  
  
  9. Broadcom (Network)
  
  
  10. Dell wireless - except in US, Japan (Network)
  
  
  11. Quickset
  
  
  12. Dell wireless bluetooh
  
  
  
  


• After all these drivers have been installed, restart the system again.


• After the system has been rebooted, put into the media direct CD and then follow the instructions to let it install. It will take awhile depending on the size of te hard drive. But once you are done installing that, your system is ready to go!

"A 5400 RPM hard drive is no different from a 7200 RPM hard drive"

Update Nov 27th: So I called in to ask for exact instructions on how to properly install all the drivers on my computer. Usually I do this myself, but I want to see if there was some faster automatic way to install the drivers. Upon installing the OS, I told them I wanted to setup to partitions, and the technician told me that DELL doesn't support this. WOW...what a bunch of crap!

Update Nov 27th: Today I finally got my 7200 RPM hard drive from Dell and I guess they really did run out of parts. Because the hard drive they sent me has a capacity of 300GB which is 160GB more than my old hard drive. About time something went my way!!!

This was what the Dell hardware department manager told me tonight. All I can say is...wow. This past week I've been dealing with Dell's utter bullcrap. My laptop hard drive mysterious died on me out of no where last week. No warning whatsoever. Just died on me. I was pretty devastated, but I figured with Dell's spectacular customer service and support I would resolve this problem with breeze.

So I called them Tuesday night and proceeded to wait a good 15-20 minutes. And finally I got to speak to a representative and proceeded to give them my laptop's service tag. Here was the response I got:

Sorry sir. But your service tag is not showing up on our systems. It appears that you haven't purchased a laptop from us.

I was like WTF? What do you mean I haven't bought a laptop from you? I am looking at a receipt that says I spent nearly two grand for this Dell laptop and you are telling me I didn't buy it from you? The representative told me I had to talk to the customer service department to fix this. Unfortunately, they were open only from 8 am to 8 pm. So I was basically out of luck tonight.

Frustrated I had to basically wait until tomorrow morning to get any help. So the following morning, I called in and explain my situation. Turns out because my original laptop had a problem and I had to get an exchange, the exchanged laptop's service tag never got registered with my account and thus it wasn't showing up. They explain to me that this would be fix within 24 hours. 48 hours at most. And they said they would call me back as soon as this has been fixed. 48 hours no call back. So I called back to get an update. And this time I wait over an hour to get any reasonable help. I got transferred from one department to another department and finally ended up in the customer service department who simply told me that I had to wait longer for the service tag to be registered.

GRRR! This was starting to piss me off. It's been over 3 days and I still haven't started to fix my laptop hard drive problem yet. I am still working on getting them to recognize the fact that I bought a laptop from them. The worst part was that the weekend was coming and the customer service department is closed on the weekends. So basically, I had to get this service tag issue solved today or else I would get no support till monday. So I ended up calling on Saturday and this time the service tag got registered. Yeah!

And after some chatting and testing, they acknowledge that the hard drive has indeed died and they would send me a new hard drive. I give them my shipping address and then proceed to wait for the new hard drive. When my new hard drive arrives I am pretty excited and pop it in and start doing all the drive installation and application installing.

However, there was one big problem. I noticed the system's installation was slower than pre-hard drive failure. I only noticed this because I use my laptop everyday with lots of computer intensive stuff. So I look into the model number of my hard drive and it turns out that the hard drive actually has a lower RPM. It is only 5400 RPM while the original one I had ordered was 7200 RPM!!! Ridiculous!!!

So I called Dell again and complained to them the situation and they tried to basically talk me out of it by saying that there was no difference between a 5400 and 7200 RPM hard drive. It all depends on the processor and memory of the laptop to make a difference. Well HELLO!?!?! My processor and memory is making a difference!! And even if it made no difference, I feel ripped off Dell. Because basically I paid more for this 7200 RPM and they are telling me it is the same now??!?! After some more arguing and scolding of Dell, they finally decided to send me a new hard drive with the 7200 RPM. Something they should have done in the beginning. And I told them that I found it absurd that they could even suggest to customers that there was no difference and hence that is why they sent me a lower quality hard drive.

After mentioning and scolding them on this issue, the technician looked into the issue and told me that the reason I got a 5400 RPM hard drive was because they ran out of 7200 RPM hard drives. What a bunch of crap!! You run of out of the equipment so you start sending lower quality equipment to make up for it? That's pathetic. Stupid Dell. Has really made me think twice about buying a computer from them again.

Plugged in powerchord turns on my laptop by itself!!

Ok I am officially going insane...or maybe my mom's Asus laptop really just turning on by itself. Recently my Dell laptop went down which has really gotten me pissed because this is a pretty critical time in my school semester for it to go down. But that issue deserves its own blog post. But anyways, in the mean time I've been using my mother's Asus laptop.

It is a huge downgrade from my supremely powerful Dell laptop. It has only 1 GB of RAM, compared to the 4 GB I have on my dell. Suffice to say, it is as slow as a sloth. But I have no choice as I need to do my school work and keep programming to keep food on my table. It does the job, except it has one very strange habit...it turns on by ITSELF. Seriously. I tell it to shutoff and then just turns on by itself a few seconds after. The first few times I didn't watch it turn off, and then I would come back like the following morning and it would be on...display the windows vista login menu screen...starring at me.

At first, I just thought I had mistaken pressed the restart button instead of the shut down button. But tonight, I pressed the shut down button and then was cleaning up and then it turned back on itself!! I tried it again and lo and behold, it turned on AGAIN!!!! WTF!!!! I was so freaked out. I did some googling online and to no avail there was nothing concrete that could help me with the situation. Not knowing what was going on, I unplugged all the peripherals which included:

1. The ethernet cable


2. The receiver for my wireless mouse and keyboard


3. The VGA cable for my monitor


4. The power chord

And then tried to shut it off, and it worked! It didn't turn on itself after that...so it appeared that one of the peripherals was turning the laptop on?!?! I've honestly never heard of a situation like this ever. But I really wanted to see what was causing this. So I plugged the power chord back in, then turned on the machine and shut it down and it actually TURNED BACK ON!!!!

The plugged in powerchord when shutting off the machine was causing the laptop to turn itself back on!!! I couldn't believe this...I still don't really know how to fix this. I'll try to look for a fix, but as of right now the only solution I have is to unplug the powerchord when shutting off and then plugging it back it once it has turned off.

This is absolutely absurd. I hate technology sometimes!!

Why do people still use IE6 seriously?

As a web developer, I am so frustrated when I hear complaints from people when they say "Oh...it looks funny in IE." People...Internet Explorer SUCKS. Seriously. It's the worst browser in the world. It can't render anything properly. It's slow. It's has a stupid terrible interface.

And the thing that pisses me off is people who not only use IE, but they use old versions of IE!!! Like IE6! WHY WHY?!?!?! Why would you use an old version of IE. There is something called UPGRADE. And it's FREE.

Here is news for all you people who use IE6. It's annoying for us web developers, not only because IE sucks and renders crappy, but because most likely we have IE7 on our own machines to test how it acts in IE7. But once we installed IE7, we CAN'T install IE6!! We have to go through all the trouble downloading a virtual machine running windows XP just so we can get a version of IE6 on it. Like for goodness. Either stop using IE, or at least upgrade to the latest version of it...

www.webserve.ca = world's worst webhost.webserve.ca

I can't even begin to express my frustration at Webserve. Two years ago, I purchased a domain and a webhosting package from Webserve thinking it was a real deal. I was only paying a little over $200 for 2 years of service with included a lot of great stuff in the package.

First started out good, but then I began to notice the website was consistently down. It seem every week there was a least a period where the website was slow or completely unreachable. Fed up, I called their supposedly great technical support to ask them what was going on. They of course, offered next to no advice other than the fact that their system was undergoing upgrades. After about a year of putting up with this garbage, I pretty much gave up on the host. And basically didn't use it anymore.

I can't exactly remember the details of the package, but I got an email the following year requesting that I pay an invoice to renew my domain. I didn't want to, so I just emailed them back saying I didn't want to renew. They redirected me to this online form which I had to fill to cancel. Which I did, and apparently my domain was canceled. I still had my hosting package for an entire year though so I just figured I would cancel that when the time came.

So a year goes by, and then I start getting these invoice requests for my domain name renewal. And I am thinking...what the heck? I already CANCELLED my domain. WHY ARE YOU REQUESTING FOR A DOMAIN RENEWAL? I tried to email to the helpdesk to get some answers, and they just kept redirecting me to that same online form to cancel the domain. But I ALREADY cancelled it, how do I cancel something that is already cancelled??!?!

And a few weeks later, I start getting invoice to renew my hosting package. At this point, I am totally baffled. I don't want my hosting package. I just want to cancel everything and not get ANYMORE invoices. How hard is that to ask? I email them again, and I get no responses. I call them to ask for support, and end up waiting in the phone queue for a good 30 mins, and then I am told to leave a voice message. Which I do explaining my current situation. Again NO REPLY.

How the heck does this company do business? Why does it take so LONG just to cancel a service at this company? Customer support/releations is NON-EXISTENT. I haven't spoken to anyone who has been remotely helpful. All I keep getting is redirection to other people who just redirect me again. I am going around in circles.

Today, I've spent over an hour on the phone just waiting. Still NO REPONSE.

DON'T USE WEBSERVE.

Totally awesome new Roger's Plan

Ok so it's been insanely long since I last posted on this blog, but I felt it was appropriate to share my latest excitement on my new phone plan.

So I've been using rogers for over the past 3 years and I hated my plan so much. It was absolutely terrible! I had a family plan with my mom and this was what we had:

1. 150 shared minutes


2. Unlimited weekends starting at 9pm on Friday


3. Unlimited calling between each other

That was it...for a whooping like $55 after everything a month! Like that is ridiculous for like basically nothing. Wow unlimited calling to my mom. I am going to call my mom so much now. And I was locked down in a 3 year contract!

Anyways, I was pretty fed up and I went to Roger's dealerships to ask if they could provide me with a better plan when my contract expired. And they said they had no power to authorize better deals and that I would have to call Rogers directly. I even went to one Roger's dealership and told the lady I wanted to cancel and her attitude quickly turned sour and treated me very badly. I wanted to slap her because they had such poor customer skills.

So I called Rogers directly and told them I was thinking of switching and wanted to see what they could offer and no one offered anything. One lady said they don't match offers. Frustrated and fed up. I had had enough with Rogers. I hated them and wanted to switch to another wireless provider. I did some research and I decided that koodo offered the most appealing package:

1. 100 Anytime minutes


2. 50 text messages


3. Unlimited evenings and weekends starting at 7pm


4. Per second billing


5. No system access fee


6. No contract and free phone

And after taxes it costs me a whooping 22.40. I should make note that Koodo says no contract, but it does technically have a contract. They work on a "tab" system in which they give you a free phone which costs a certain amount of money. What happens if Koodo will take 10% of whatever your phone bill is every month (before taxes) and use that 10% to pay it towards your cellphone. When I say take 10%, they aren't literally discounting anything, they are just treated 10% of that money to be used to pay your cellphone. Here's an example of how it works:

Say your new cellphone costs $75. And your monthly phone bill is $20 (before taxes). This means that $2 which is 10% of your monthly phone bill is used to pay towards your cellphone. Note that your phone bill is STILL $20. So technically, to pay off your cellphone it would take 75/2 = 32.5 months or almost 3 years to pay off your cellphone. Should you decide to cancel your Koodo service, then you just pay off whatever you still owe on the cellphone. So it's a "soft contract" as they like to call it.

I wanted to switch right away, but of course I had to wait until my contact completely expired. And then I would have to give my 30 days cancellation notice, and then after that I would be able to switch. And to add to the complication, I wanted to keep my cell phone number because there is "phone number portability" now. But I had to make sure I was still with Rogers, since they "owned" my number, when I ask Koodo to take that number from Rogers.

So after much thinking the plan was to give Rogers my 30 days cancellation notice like after my contract expires, and then approach Koodo like 3 days before the cancellation is official and have them then take the number away. This is technically start my Koodo plan right away and thus for like 3 days I would be paying two wireless phone bills. This was the best way to approach the problem.

So a few days ago, my contract ended and it was finally time to give Roger's my 30 days notice. I was actually hoping they would try to persuade me with a new plan considering how I'd actually reached the stage where my contract expired and I was literally giving them my 30 day's notice. But part of me was doubting that it was going to happen. To be honest, I didn't really want to leave rogers. I wanted to stick with a gcms phone since that technology was better, and also change service providers is a fricking pain in the butt.

Anyways, I called them and I was first put on hold a like 5 minutes and I finally I got to talked to someone. However, it turns out I was talking to the cable department (no idea how I reached there). The representative transfered me to wireless saying they could handle my cancellation. Waited in line for another like 5-10 minutes. Only to find out, I had to talk to the cancellation department to complete cancellation. Now I was getting frustrated. Was this some kind of stupid Roger's ploy to get me to wait in line so long that I would just get frustrated and impatient and just give up on canceling since it took so long.

After waiting in line for another 5-10 minutes I finally got to talk to a representative. I told her I wanted to cancel. And then she actually tried to OFFER me something! The first time someone from Rogers tried to offer me anything. I was open ears, but at the same time pretty sure I was going to just reject the offer and cancel. But as it turns out she offered me a pretty damn good deal:

1. 200 anytime minutes


2. Unlimited evenings and weekends starting at 8pm


3. Call display


4. Free rogers to rogers (with two year contract)

For only $25.14 after everything! Sure it was a little more expensive than the Koodo plan, but I got free rogers to rogers and call display. It's not per second billing, but the extra 100 minutes (or should I say like extra like 200 minutes since my mom never uses her mom anyways) will cover that. And yeah I am locked down for 2 years, but I needed that Rogers to Rogers since it technically keeps my family plan with my mom (she got the same package). And best of all, I don't have to switch providers allowing me to stick with my gcms phone.

So I learned a big lesson. When you want to get a deal, talk to the fricking "cancellation" department. All the other departments and dealerships are $^%&(*)_+ useless!

Stop spreading us your lies Translink!

On a bus ride to work, I requested a stop and started walking towards the exit. A passenger in front of me was allowed off first as I was still making my way to the exit. The bus driver then closed the door and was about to drive away from the stop just as I reached the exit. I asked politely to be let off, the bus driver refused claiming I was “walking too slow.” He then said I could get off the next stop, and started driving away from the stop. I was completely applauded. I asked for his name, and was met with the response that "I have no right to ask for his name." When I claimed I had every right because I was a customer, he said I was nothing more than a "passenger." Is that what users of your service are called? And Translink claims the fare hike was to improve the service for “customers”? Who are the customers? Stop spreading us your lies Translink.