4.6 hours, cauliflower ear, & it better be fixed

We bought a new Dell computer in September and we have loved it. However when our 30 day trial of anti-virus software expired I neglected to renew it. And we got slammed with some viruses and trojans. Paul and I spent about 8 hours trying to clean things up ourselves; reinstall drivers, disk defragmenting, etc. Nothing worked. We were losing our patience and our minds.

So as a last ditch resort, we called Dell and after coughing up over $150 in service fees (and getting a one year service warranty package) the tech guy started working on our computer. It was all done over the internet. He took control of the computer and fixed it all. The only downside - I was on the phone from 8:30am to 1:10pm!

He found a lot of viruses, missing drivers, a few trojans, and some glitch in windows vista. We had to start from scratch to fix it. In other words, everything had to come off the computer and be reinstalled. Due to the lengthy process, I took a picture of my telephone, which shows how long you have been talking on it, to prove how long I was on the phone. (It's hard to see, but in the top right hand corner it says 4:23:34 - that was about 10 minutes before I hung up.)

In the end, my ear was sore, my back hurt and I was super cranky -it's really bad how dependant I am on a machine. (And another frustrating issue-30 days after we bought this computer, with windows Vista, microsoft comes out with Windows 7, which is supposed to be so awesome). The tech guy offered to upgrade our computer for an extra $120 for Windows 7, but I declined spending any more money than was absolutely necessary. We now have a great anti-virus program and hopefully we'll be spared any future 5 hours telephone conversations with the Dell Tech department.