I had a major malfunction today. My computer is a Dell Dimension that I got in March (07). I opened Dell Information Alerts and found that I could download some new drivers for the Nvidia graphics card. So I did. Wrong, very wrong, move!!! When the computer rebooted to finish installation, I got the dreaded blue screen of death, not once but every time I rebooted. I couldn't even boot into safe mode. It would crash, not matter what mode I tried to boot into. I could never get to "system restore". I finally called Dell tech support. I was on the phone with him (he was a nice guy) but in the end he didn't seem to know too much. He walked me through a number of attempts to boot and restore, but it would crash, stay on the blue screen of death for several minutes, the begin to reboot.
He finally told me that I would need to restore from the disk and would lose all my files. But I could get a cheap hard drive, install it, and put the other drive in a box that would make it an external hard drive. Then I could access my data and save it to the cheap hard drive, then restore the original drive. He told me how to do the reinstall, then hung up. I was on the phone for 87 minutes with tech support. I got the phone book, called a couple of places about making my hard drive a slave drive and then copying the data to some DVDs for me. The second place I called asked me some questions after I explained what I wanted. We talked for a bit, and I knew that this was someone who knew computers. I had just enough time to get the computer to his place before he closed. When I got there, he started the computer up, and, to make the story short, 30 minutes later, my computer has restored, working like it had before I decided to update those drivers.
The longer story is that the Dell tech simply wasn't knowledgeable enough about Vista and how to get to a "system restore" dialog. It took the local computer guru only a few minutes to find the place (hitting F8 repeatedly while booting) where he could get the computer to restore. I had seen the "restore my computer" on the F8 menu while going through everything with the Dell tech, but he wouldn't have me try that. I'm not even sure that he knew it was there. But that was what was needed. By booting up from that command, it brought up a dialog box of options on the welcome screen that included "system restore" and from there he was able to get the computer back to normal.
Now, about that Nvidia card. Seems I don't have one at all, though I thought I did. Seems my graphics is a chip set on the motherboard. I didn't need to download any drivers. I am getting rid of the Dell thing. And from now on when I run into trouble I will look up a local computer guru and forget Dell support.
For those Vista users out there, you can do a system restore, even if you are getting the dreaded blue screen of death. But don't depend on the telephone support tech to be able to tell you.
