Three days down without a computer!
I just got back online last night after being down for 3 days, thanks Time Warner.
I recently called Road Runner and asked, for like the fourth time, for them to send someone out to properly install my cable amplifier box. The box is located outside of my home and has been damaged since the 2004 hurricane season.
My mom calls them up and tells them that why they will be out on that date to also convert the cable drop feed to underground. Bad mistake, I have learned from previous experience with this company that you can not add to a trouble ticket and they will not allow two tickets open at once. Consequently, the trouble ticket was turned into the convert to underground instead of my original request.
After these guys have completed the job and are already gone from the property, I sit down to go to work. Turning on my computer ( which I built ) I find that my box has big issues. I run on a dual boot system of XP Home Edition and XP 64 Professional which I run 90 % of the time. So, when I boot my computer it gets to the XP screen loading and then reboots. Huh? OK, so I try it again and same thing, the system reboots. This time I try to go to safe mode in the XP 64 with no luck. The system just reboots again. I try to go to the XP Home Edition and this makes it all the way to log-in. I log-in only to find that I now have sixteen new PCI devices that no driver will install for. On top of all this I am offline! No Internet and no intranet. I have lost all communication for no apparent reason.
Then I remember the Time Warner service call that had happened earlier in the day. It appears that some voltage must have slipped in and knocked out my NIC ( network interface card ) and did other possible damage to the motherboard. OK, time to get on the telephone with Road Runner support. They determined in s few short minutes that it was not a hardware problem, it was not their problem, so it must be a software problem. They transferred me to Microsoft Support directly. I must admit, I was very surprised at the phone support given by the Microsoft tech. His name was Kevin, we spent almost three hours on the phone trying to determine the cause and fix the errors. Kevin with MS was not going to give up! Even after he had finally diagnosed the problem to the system BIOS and most likely corruption caused by a spike, he did not want to give up.
As directed, I called Road Runner after I got off the phone with Microsoft with a case number. Unfortunately, dispatch notifies me that they will not be able to have PC Tech come out until Tuesday, two days away. I was not happy with this answer at all, but what could I do. The appointment was scheduled, I thought, between the hours of 11 an 3. I was at least able to do minor tasks and play some games that I had not played in some time.
Tuesday finally arrives and I am surprisingly still sane. I await the knock on the door of the cable guy, remember the appointment was between 11 and 3. Shortly after 3:00, when the Time Warner tech failed to show, I was on the phone. Of course they apologized for the inconvenience and told me that they would contact the tech and have him call me. After 20 minutes I called to see if they knew my telephone number. Again, they apologize and say they are checking the status of the technician. I am not quite sure how you check the status of a technician, but they assured me that they would. At 4:45 I called to check on the status of the dispatcher checking the status of the tech that was supposed to be at my location hours ago. This time it was explained that due to the sensitive nature of my computer having damage they would have to assign this to the technical supervisor. I was also told that this technical supervisor would not be able to arrive until the next day. In the meanwhile, Kevin form Microsoft calls me to ask how things went with my service call with Road Runner. I explained to him that my appointment had now been rescheduled for the following day. I was smoking hot!
As I said earlier, I had built this computer. Why would I wait on a tech that was not going to show up and even when he did would not know what to do. I started realizing that this company was not going to cover the damages that they had done anyway and more than likely had a huge damage waiver clause in the agreement. I started to think, that this voltage either continued on through my NIC causing more damage, or burnt the NIC out causing it to short. If it was the case of the latter, then maybe pulling the NIC out would prove my theory. I removed the NIC from my main board and BINGO, back up and running on both operating systems. Because my main board has an on board LAN connection, I plugged in to my network and fired up the computer. I was back in business and back online simply by pulling the NIC out of the system. Computer problem solved but Time Warner still scheduled for service call.
The cable guy calls, on time and says he is 10 minutes away, so I wait. He shows up on time, impressive. He tells me he is here to fix the cable wires and amplifier, unimpressive. It appears the support ticket had now reverted back to my original request. This guy informs me that he is NOT a PC tech after I go through the entire explanation of what had happened. Then he starts to cop an attitude and states that they will not replace any of my computer that has been damaged and that his cable does not carry voltage, it carries dB, so the damage could not have been caused by the cable system. I did a little research on this voltage in time Warner cable and came up with a slew of pages, but two that I found particularly interesting. First of all, the cable guy was right, the signal is measured in dB, matter of fact it is measured in dBmV ( decibel millivolts ) discussed here.
Another page I found rather interesting was where a lady had documented 5 months of problems caused to her television by voltage in her TV cable. So there is voltage in the Time Warner cable that could cause the NIC damage.
At any rate, I had already determined the computer problem and fixed it. So, I went on about my day and left the cable guy to go on about his.
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