A lot more work than I expected (and all for naught)
April 7 -14, 2005
My gripe isn't with the individual members of Alienware's technical staff. I believe they were following Alienware policy, so I don't want to create the impression of a personal attack by naming individuals' names. Instead, I'll refer to the primary technician who worked with me as Larry. Larry's manager is Mo. A corporate troubleshooter who came into the picture later is Curly. These are NOT their real names.
Larry (Alienware's technician) called on April 7 to tell me that Alienware had discovered an incompatibility between their motherboard and the Matrox video coprocessor. Configuring such a system with a RAID array would cause problems. He asked me to put a disk controller card into the system. We would connect the disks to the card instead of the motherboard. It didn't sound like a big deal, so I agreed.
I didn't expect to need to back up the operating system or Alienware-supplied applications, drivers, etc., because I had bought the AlienRespawn recovery kit. As their website puts it:
Larry set me straight on this on April 13. We were going to have to reformat the drives, then reload the system one piece at a time because this was going to be a fundamental change to my system.
This was going to be a lot more work than the few hours I had expected, and way more than I would have agreed to do at end of term. I felt committed at this point--I had said yes, the controller was here, the configuration phone call was scheduled--so I continued.
I was a consultant for a long time. A red flag goes up when I get surprised about the scope of a job. Am I listening badly or am I getting only part of the story? That basic question--let me restate it--can I trust these people?--came up again and again until I finally ran out of trust on May 30 and demanded a refund.
Backing up the system was troublesome. Backup software (including the software that came with the USB-connected external hard drives) failed intermittently, so I had to copy files in batches, babysitting the process overnight. I made two full backups, to two 400 gb hard drives. (Compulsive? Maybe. But when the system failed a month later and took down one of those drives, I sure was happy to have the second.)
On April 14, we installed the replacement card. I did the physical work while Larry gave instructions over the phone.
The task itself was not easy. This card would fill the last open slot, had to be placed in a specific slot and moving another card (the Matrox card, which was huge) into its new slot was impossible given the cable configuration.
I eventually got the cards in, but we had significant problems setting up the RAID. When we attempted to set up a RAID array, we got garbage text (random ASCII characters in random places) on the setup screen--and no RAID. At about midnight, we called it a night and agreed to try again on the night of the 17th.
My gripe isn't with the individual members of Alienware's technical staff. I believe they were following Alienware policy, so I don't want to create the impression of a personal attack by naming individuals' names. Instead, I'll refer to the primary technician who worked with me as Larry. Larry's manager is Mo. A corporate troubleshooter who came into the picture later is Curly. These are NOT their real names.
Larry (Alienware's technician) called on April 7 to tell me that Alienware had discovered an incompatibility between their motherboard and the Matrox video coprocessor. Configuring such a system with a RAID array would cause problems. He asked me to put a disk controller card into the system. We would connect the disks to the card instead of the motherboard. It didn't sound like a big deal, so I agreed.
I didn't expect to need to back up the operating system or Alienware-supplied applications, drivers, etc., because I had bought the AlienRespawn recovery kit. As their website puts it:
"RECOVER YOUR SYSTEM IN MINUTES!What I naively expected was that we would plug in the new controller, plug in the drives, and then read the existing data off the drives. If that didn't work, I figured we'd use Respawn (a Norton Ghost image of the shipped system) to restore the system to its original state and then I'd reload my applications and data.
AlienRespawn(TM) allows you to restore your
system to its original state from when it left the
Alienware factory. Fresh and clean!"
Larry set me straight on this on April 13. We were going to have to reformat the drives, then reload the system one piece at a time because this was going to be a fundamental change to my system.
This was going to be a lot more work than the few hours I had expected, and way more than I would have agreed to do at end of term. I felt committed at this point--I had said yes, the controller was here, the configuration phone call was scheduled--so I continued.
I was a consultant for a long time. A red flag goes up when I get surprised about the scope of a job. Am I listening badly or am I getting only part of the story? That basic question--let me restate it--can I trust these people?--came up again and again until I finally ran out of trust on May 30 and demanded a refund.
Backing up the system was troublesome. Backup software (including the software that came with the USB-connected external hard drives) failed intermittently, so I had to copy files in batches, babysitting the process overnight. I made two full backups, to two 400 gb hard drives. (Compulsive? Maybe. But when the system failed a month later and took down one of those drives, I sure was happy to have the second.)
On April 14, we installed the replacement card. I did the physical work while Larry gave instructions over the phone.
The task itself was not easy. This card would fill the last open slot, had to be placed in a specific slot and moving another card (the Matrox card, which was huge) into its new slot was impossible given the cable configuration.
I eventually got the cards in, but we had significant problems setting up the RAID. When we attempted to set up a RAID array, we got garbage text (random ASCII characters in random places) on the setup screen--and no RAID. At about midnight, we called it a night and agreed to try again on the night of the 17th.
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