Dealing With Tech Support

There are days that I just want to crawl back into bed.  Today happens to be one of them.

I know I mentioned a few days ago that I was going to take 30 days for myself.  Well so far that really hasn't happened.  Everyone deserves a vacation and I'm still waiting to get mine.

For the past several days I've been doing laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning and paying the bills.  I'm trying to make life that much easier on my soldier.  My back is killing me along with my feet and just yesterday my right hip popped out of socket.  It popped back in then back out and back in repeatedly for a few hours.  Not a pleasant feeling mind you.  So I guess I'll only get to the cooking of the pork loin roast today with the trimmings.  I was going to do more laundry.

My main task today was calling three tech support places about my husband's computer.  Its a Toshiba laptop.  While he was deployed to Iraq, Toshiba in conjunction with Microsoft was offering free upgrades to Windows 7.  However each time my husband tried to file for his free upgrade there was a glitch.  He never got his free copy of Windows 7. 

So this brings me to the next point of the problem.  J's laptop stopped reading DVDs and CDs.  It refused to operate properly and would act like it had PMS.  After sending the computer out for repairs to his extended warranty company they install a new hard drive and DVD/CDROM-RW.  He gets it back and now the main screen is a C prompt.  GREAT!

J calls up the company that just repaired it, gets put on hold and disconnected. I call them back as well.  I then called up Microsoft and they said they couldn't do a thing about it.  The old hard drive had a partition in it that would prevent the OS from being deleted.  Well and good but we don't have the old hard drive now.  I was instructed to call Toshiba.  They wanted to charge me to even talk to a tech because the first warranty with them had expired.  I asked for the Tech Manager. 

It all comes down to this, no one cares if the darn restore disks don't work.  No one cares that there is no longer an OS installed.  J now has to pay out of pocket to get their restore discs or have his computer sent away for another month to have them install another Windows Vista to his laptop. 

This is wrong on so many levels.  First off Toshiba and Microsoft owe him the free upgrade.  Secondly had they fulfilled his request when he requested it numerous times during the offer period we wouldn't be needing a restore disk for his OS we'd have a copy, an actual disc on hand.  I tried to explain this to both companies.  They don't care if he was deployed and couldn't call tech support from Iraq.

So the best I can now offer my spouse when he comes out of the field is the offer that the Tech Manager gave me of two options, pay out or send the computer back with the hopes that they can fix the issue.  If this can't be fixed we have one expensive paperweight.  I just would like to know why the repair company who installed a new hard drive didn't install an OS.  Why?