I have to say that everyone I have dealt with at Dell has been courteous and professional, they just haven't solved the problem with Windows 7 and my year-old hardware. Indeed, they have fallen back on the old chestnut of IT support, “When all else fails, blame the user”.
A techincian arrived today and installed a new MOBO. The process was relatively quick and painless but what happened after was far from it. He powered up the machine and for a brief millisecond, perhaps less, I dared to hope that the problem had been fixed but the 0x00000124 BSOD came roaring back. Reboot and freeze. Reboot and freeze. Call Dell. Plug and Play. Remove and reinsert. Proceed methodically through a checklist that NASA would be proud of to arrive at the conclusion that my year-old, Vista ready, 64-bit machine was not, in fact, Windows 7 ready. This despite the earlier advice from Dell that it was and all the online scans from Dell and Microsoft that yeilded no areas of concern.
And then it came, a curved ball out of left field. A ball with such bend that David Beckham himself would marvel. The Dell tech on the phone revealed that they only support the original configuration (and items purchase from Dell. As I had purchased the retail version of Windows 7, Dell couldn't actually support me.
This revelation came after a prolonged period when the Dell tech on the phone was speaking with his supervisor. Seemed a lot like a car salesman, “Well my manager says he can't do that, but I'll throw in a dead fish in the air conditioner intake for you”. The Dell tech explained that Dell didn't actually have any Windows 7 64-bit drivers for some of the parts of my machine and therefore, Windows 7 wasn't actually supported. I could either call Microsoft or Dell would ship me an image drive to take me back to April 9, 2009, when my machine rolled off their assembly line.
Much as I didn't want to, I opted for the image disk. Microsoft wouldn't be able to solve my problem – they'd just point me back to Dell. So now I have to wait another day for the image disk to arrive, set my machine back a year and then reload all the software and all the updates. It'll take weeks to get back to where I was, so maybe I shouldn't try. Maybe I should just head off the where I want to go. Wonder what it will cost to convert my software library to Mac?