Recently I was working away on my XPS 210 from Dell, mining my own business while getting ready to package up a client’s project for delivery when suddenly I hear the PC’s fan kick into high gear. I found it quite strange since it has never done that and I wasn’t running any heavy duty applications at the time, so I saved my progress and shut down the computer to give it some rest for about half an hour while I showered and got ready.

When I returned to my work area, I turned on the PC to get it up and running and burn the project onto several cds when I see that the system didn’t want to boot (start up). I thought nothing of it and tried to boot the PC again, when I noticed that it did it once again, my PC wasn’t booting! Now, I got a bit panicy but tried to stay zen-like and said fine, I’ll just wait a bit longer and give it some cool-down time while I call it into Dell’s tech support to see if they had any ideas on what could be causing the issue.

Several hours later, I’m still on the phone with tech support, missed my meeting with a very important client and was pulling my hair from all the diagnostic tests I was performing on the PC to see what was wrong. Mind you, I hadn’t slept in about 48 hours, so this was just excruciatingly annoying, the tech guy even hung up the phone on me in the middle of the tests (maybe because he lacked the sufficient skills to solve this particular issue but that’s a different story altogether), so I breathed in deeply and continued running the tests while I called back into Dell’s tech support.

Once I finally reached one of the tech support representatives I actually got someone that was well educated and savvy with what was going on, he ran all the diagnostic results and came to the final conclusion that Dell had provided me with a faulty mother board (basically the main thing that makes your PC run and perform functions in accordance with the processor), I was shocked since I recently purchased this PC. For anyone that depends on their computers to pull through due to the fact that they make an earning solely from them, this is the worst thing that can happen to you. It’s as if someone gave a pilot a plane with a faulty engine and at about 30,000 feet with around 300 passengers, the engine kicks off!… Hmm, that would really not make your day at all.

Well, luckily I’m not a pilot and at least I was fortunate enough to still be under warranty. So now I have an in-house tech working with me to schedule an on-site repair, he’s coming into swap out the faulty mother board with a brand new one. Finally I’ll be able to continue with what I was doing and put all this behind me. In the meantime, I’m working off a laptop and as you can see I’m catching up on some writing.

I guess life has a dark sense of humor sometimes which tests your ability to stay calm in the most stressful of situations. I don’t know about you but I’m swaying a little more towards Mac systems everyday. Lets just see what life can throw at my new Macs when I get them in.

Update:
So the technician comes in, swaps the mother board and on my way I go, no agonizing ordeal whatsoever, just a quick and painless procedure. I’m now back on my feet and ready to continue what I was doing. This experience has taught me much in the reliability department, showing me that I should always watch my steps a little closer while I working off of any PC from now on. Hopefully my new Mac computers which should arrive soon will provide me with a less percentage of risk for these kind of things to happen, I’m also getting extra external hard drives for additional protection.