Have you ever had one of those weeks were everything seems to be falling apart?  That has been my week, this week.  The latest is my laptop.  Several days ago I woke up to a blinking screen when I decided to have tea and catch up from over night posts.  For an hour, my screen blinked. OMG!! Tried everything, looked up tutorials, message boards, restarted, etc.  Then finally, I moved my lap top to another desk and poof, the blinking stopped.  I'm just going to say, in a Battlestar Galactica term, "What the Frack?"

Then the creme de la creme was the same laptop decided to not type anymore yesterday.  Click on any key, nada.....again.....What the Frack?

Subsequently, after hours of research and restarting, my Alienware Laptop needed some updating on the driver's ....oops!!

Technology, love it or hate it....lol!

OMG, the Bios!  I got the stern look from my daughter yesterday when she discovered I was in the Bios of my Alienware laptop!

Loosing your data is catastrophic with a hard drive crash.  I can only imagine how you must have felt at the moment you realized your hard drive was no more.  I'm really glad you were able to recover some of your data and have a new SSD drive installed. The USB thumb drive for back-ups is an awesome choice! Fast is always great too! 

In my first post, I had thought it was a driver update because it started working, but since my keyboard wasn't working at all as of yesterday morning again despite all of my diagnostics, I had to break down and call Dell support.  After an hour on the phone with support, which included uninstalling my most recent Microsoft updates, lots of restarts, and then finally in the bios to uninstall the driver, and then reinstall the driver, the tech determined it was my keyboard and it had to be replaced.  I've not even had my laptop for a year, but the only shining light in this, is I do have a warranty that ends this month.  Dell will replace the parts.

In the past few years, I've had two hard drive crashes.   One was on my ASUS desktop, which I loved, and I could recover, what was on it, and the other crash was a smaller desktop, that just couldn't handle the work I was doing on it, which was a lot of graphic work.  It crashed, I cried, but my husband was able to do some magic and recover the work on it and all of that data is on my external hard drive.  Now, I have all of my previous computers work backed up on an external hard drive, though now reading what you went through, I need to add all of the work on this laptop with the failed keyboard on an external drive too, just in case.

To answer your question, can we live without technology, I'd have to agree....no can't live without it.  My world evolves around it and it's very weird not to have it.  It is almost like an addiction because you really know it's not accessible when you have a technology failure and you are a bit lost without that access at your fingertips.

Right now, I have an external keyboard attached to my laptop to be able to use it.  Dell will notify me when they have the parts and will do the repairs at the office, rather then me sending the laptop off to neverland until they repair it.

Technology, love it when it works, but can't live without it! Good point, Mark

My laptop saga is still ongoing.  I'm using an external keyboard to use my laptop.  All in 12 hours, I got a message that the parts weren't in yet, but then a technician will be coming today to repair my laptop.  Well, ummm...if I'm sleeping while this is happening, I have no way to respond.  More so then that, which is it?  Are the parts in or not?  I've just spent two hours of my life on the phone with "tech support", two hours of my life I can't get back,  to resolve my issue.  After being transferred to two different numbers, then finally told I'd have to call this other number, I did get to the right department....though that's after explaining my issue, um...lost count on how many times?

Now I'm waiting on a call, email or text as to when I can schedule my on-site repair for my laptop.  I wonder if I'm going to get this communication anytime soon?  At this point, I think I'm going to grab some chocolate.  Yes, a before noon thing, as I believe I've earned it. 

Mike Smith said:

Web Diva, what's the latest on your laptop? There's nothing more infuriating than **** customer service when you need them most and I'm surprised that Dell are this bad.

Re quality of support, my workplace uses Lenovo laptops and the support there doesn't seem to be too bad there, if you're considering switching brands after this experience.

Personally though, I don't especially like the build quality, they have sealed batteries (yes, on a frigging laptop, bad enough on smartphones) and the base is screwed down with a zillions screws making RAM and SSD upgrades a total PITA, so I'd look elsewhere, perhaps HP.

 

To both: I can't stress the importance of backups enough. The key to remember, is that if you have only one copy of your data, you're 100% going to lose it, it's just a matter of time. From hardware failure, to accidental deletion to malicious action by a third party, something will happen to it. Make a copy on a separate drive and the picture changes radically.

It's good practice to make two copies of your data, one local and one in the cloud if possible for an offsite backup in case of fire, theft etc and update them frequently. In the end, it's not possible to always prevent data loss, as the very latest stuff that you're working on right now may not have had a chance to be backed up, but it can be massively minimised.

Microsoft 365 isn't a bad cloud option here. You get 1TB of OneDrive storage along with the full MS Office suite and if you can get a discount then so much the better. I have a personal subscription and work has a corporate one and it generally works very well.

Personally, I've been using Karen's Replicator since 2009, configured to create a mirror backup. The app is free, but be aware that there's no more development going on with it nowadays unfortunately.

You can get it at the link below, but be aware that the web browser will give you a security warning since the Let's Encrypt SSL cert expired yesterday. It doesn't bode well for the continuation of this site if the webmaster doesn't fix this soon.

https://www.karenware.com/powertools/karens-replicator-backup-utility

 

Finally, how do I tag people here? I tried using @ but it didn't expand the username.

Sure, I'd look into Lenovo....after this experience with Dell Alienware, they have taken away my faith in their product and customer service.  Having a new laptop and in less then a year, the keyboard fails, what's next?  Thanks for that tip and advice!!

The problem with Dell is they are outsourcing their repairs, so I'm dealing with Dell on the initial repair ticket, but then Dell is using a third party to coordinate my repair.  Dell says I should talk to the third party doing the repair, that would be nice, but thei third party company emails are "no reply" emails without a phone number, and I really can't figure out who they really are because of the name.  

The latest, is at the end of last week after getting conflicting messages from both Dell and the third party repair agent, I emailed the Dell agent that's supposed to be over my repair order.  I told Dell clearly Tuesday was out on the repair and the rest of the week was fine.  Last Friday, I get an email that my repair is scheduled for Saturday.  Well, funny, because I'm sending my laptop to the office with my husband and the office isn't open on Saturday.  Then, I get another email, that it's now scheduled on Tuesday, (today) and after that I get another email that the parts aren't in, only to find out the parts were sent back.  WTH???  I've just not had the energy to deal with this today, but I'm going to have to yet, write another email.  Talking to someone is impossible, but I'm going to see if I can. I think the bigger problem, and it shouldn't be a problem, is that I'm scheduling "on site" repair.  If I just sent my laptop in for, I don't know how long they would have it, I wouldn't be going through all of this coordinating logistical nightmare. I've been told the repair takes about 45 minutes.  I do have other computers, but unfortunately, this laptop has everything I use on it and it's mobile unlike my desktop. 

So there's the latest on the laptop repair saga.  Not repaired and still using my G910 gamer keyboard to type with.  My laptop doesn't like this keyboard sitting on the keys either.  It keeps getting hot, so I take breaks.

Alienware has sealed batteries, eh?  Funny you should mention the upgrading process, that's what Dell bills as a benefit to this Alienware, nary a thought to how much work to make that happen if there's so many screws and a nightmare design.

Agreed on saving your data, which I need to do. I should just do that today and stop putting it off.  I have too many graphics I designed in Coreldraw this past year, that would be a tragedy to lose.

I do have the MS office suite and onedrive.  I'll revisit those options.  Frustrating though, I got 4 Terra bytes on this laptop so I wouldn't have to store my data elsewhere, though Karen's Replicator sounds really nice to look into too!

On tagging, you can put your @"member's name" and the member will receive the notification.  It would be nice if SE's tagging would work like xF.  I'm waiting on an new version update. If tagging is not addressed in the new version, then I'll put in a request to see if SE would update their tagging system.

My laptop repair saga has continued.  In the past two weeks, my laptop has been taken apart by a 3rd party repair person hired through Dell.  Firstly, I'm not sure I'm really thrilled about that. The first repair, the replacement of the keyboard wasn't sufficient.  The following week, which was this past Wednesday, my laptop was taken apart again to replace the motherboard and what-not parts. 

I can now type on my keyboard without an external keyboard, that is now fixed, however to get to the point of getting into my laptop was no easy task after this repair because the motherboard was replaced and bitlocker was activated.

Once I opened up my laptop, the only way to get back in it was with a bitlocker access key.  Without this access key, everything on my computer will be gone.  Thankfully, I had a backup on an external hard drive before all of this nonsense repair started. The trick was knowing all of your emails associated with your Dell laptop, your microsoft account, all of your passwords and taking a deep breath when you finally got to your bitlocker access key.  There's a series of three sets of numbers on the page where you access key is.  You actually have to open a third folder to get to the final key code.  This key code is 48 characters long.  Once I entered the bitlocker access key my computer did some thinking and I thought it was going to open up.  It did not.  It went back to the blue screen of death but asking me for the access key again offering other options.  At this point, I'm in a wth mood and decided to just punt.  I typed in my bitlocker access code again, noting that now the text has changed and was typing in italics.  Now I'm totally alarmed.  After I entered the code, my pc went through it's authentication  process again.  I finally got access, but the next 'uh-oh" moment came when my pc wanted my microsoft password, email etc.  Despite my efforts to clearly, so I thought, have all of my passwords organized on a document (and thankfully this document is on another computer), I failed in figuring out what was needed to get into my account.  Numerous attempts and numerous passwords, resetting passwords etc, I did finally get into my computer.

I can't stress enough, in your password documents or wherever you save your passwords, make it really clear the email that's attached to the password (and detail what it's used for) and if you change the password make sure to always update that password list.

So here's the problem now....my RGB lights don't work in the back of my computer and the Alien FX doesn't even appear to be on my pc anymore.  Emails to Dell again.  The emails to Dell with screen shots was another adventure in my patience yesterday. My pics would not go through, but finally I was able to send one pic at a time.

Why can't anything work anymore, or last for a number of years before there's an issue?  There's a lot of time management involved in coordinating this type of repair, the logistics etc. 

Now I wait again for what's next. 

I believe the Dell repair saga has now closed.  After the third repair appointment, my Alienware laptop seems to be working like it should.  The RGB light failure was caused by a shelf component that had to be replaced.  I also lost the Alienware FX software during this failure.  Now that the component has been replaced, my laptop is working like it should.

I actually was getting pain in my arm while using the external keyboard because I was hyper extending my arm to use the mouse.  My keyboard was fullsize and the only way I could type was to sit the keyboard over my keys on my laptop.

I'm glad this part of my tech life is getting back to normal.  Certainly not a serious problem in the present day world having broken tech, but it does have it's issues if what you do requires "tools" to get "what you do...done".