As part of prepping my Road Warrior machine to accept Server 2008 and put the new and improved Hyper-V through its paces, I decided I needed to suck down some 64-bit device drivers. Shouldn’t be too hard – after all, the Latitude line is Dell’s corporate standard, and the D830 is the current top-of-the-line model. So I go to the driver download page, click the drop-down operating system menu, and find – no entry for Server 2008.
OK, it’s a laptop after all, so I guess it’s not unreasonable to discover that Dell’s support doesn’t extend to server operating systems. There IS a category for Vista 64-bit, and my bet is that these drivers should work with Server 2008. It’s all Longhorn, right? (I’ll report later on whether this bet turns out to be correct.) And I discover that there are 50 items to download. Now, I don’t think I’ll need all of them by any means, but it occurs to me that it would be handy to have all this stuff on a CD instead of initiating four dozen or so separate downloads. So I call Dell customer support.
You know where I’m going with this, of course. After about 20 minutes on the phone with various polite gentlemen from another country, most of which was spent on hold, I am informed that because my laptop was not shipped with Vista 64-bit, Dell is incapable of providing the driver CD for Vista 64-bit. I ask whether Dell *has* a driver CD for 64-bit Vista, and receive a “yes.” I ask whether that CD has a part number – again, yes. I express a willingness to pay for the CD, because it could save me some time (although at this point, that’s looking doubtful). Sorry, the CD is not available to me at any price. I am tempted to ask “If I paid you ONE MILLION DOLLARS, would you send me the CD,” but my Dr. Evil accent would probably be lost on the customer support rep, so I give up and hang up – fed up. Even after all these years, PC support still sucks rocks, even if you buy a premier product from a big-name vendor. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the Web, to make 50 or so separate downloads.
