Dell

On Dell:

My new motherboard arrived last night, accompanied by a Dell service representative who had never seen a dirt road before. Apparently there was some error at the factory with the old one, and it burned out cleanly; but so far, the new one works fine.

Dell seems to have moved its help center to India (along with the rest of the tech industry), and the experience of dealing with them is much like what you'd expect. However, once they determined (in the step-by-painful-step method that such call centers employ) that the error was indeed critical, they arranged to send someone to the house. The experience was painless: I borrowed the wee wife's computer for email and so forth, and now I'm back.

So: it looks like I need to sit down and read through an excellent discussion in the "On Sport" post, before I go further. I should leave you folks alone more often!