If you want to know why I haven't been blogging much, I bought a new Dell "All_In_One" XPS1, with a 4-year, 24-hour, weekends included, upgraded service warranty about 3 months ago.

I had no problems hooking it all up and everything worked out of the box, except it was first experience with Vista. After working with the new OS, new software and brand new machine for the first month, I noticed that while it was rather slow for a modern machine, it had gradually gotten more stable and required fewer reboots.

After about a month, it started requiring excessive reboots, mostly, I believe, from using the built-in TV tuner, which is displayed in a window, an application called, "Windows Media Center". (If there was ever a reason to have competition in a market, this software deserves a quick death. I could find no 3rd-party replacements. Since it's built-in to the OS, you'd think MS would have noticed it's non-standard, hard to use, and do a rewrite!)

Anyway, when it worked, it was acceptable, and I didn't bother tech services yet. One morning, I came in to a white screen, and no matter what troubleshooting I could think of then or within minutes, any ideas of an overseas tech I had contacted under my warranty. I had a "Dispatch Number", for a service tech to contact me locally for an appointment to come and fix the machine.

Despite numerous calls on my part to the warranty phone numbers attempting to determine why my machine wasn't fixed yet, I had no contact from the local company for 5 days, during which time a nice young guy really tried to get it working, but Dell had not sent the proper parts. It was the entire "screen", which actually contains the motherboard.

It was arranged that I would get a shipment of a brand-new unit, with a paid shipping tag to return the old broken unit to Dell. This took until Friday afternoon of the week after the Thursday morning that the unit was identified to be dead in the water.

I am extremely disappointed in this response, because the one other time I had to have a tech come to my house, it was within the specified 24 hours. That was probably 8 years ago. My how times have changed.

At any rate, I am slowly rebuilding this new machine, and I'm crossing my fingers, (which makes typing this really difficult!), that I won't have to repeat this process again every two months for 4 years...