This collection of entries is from October 10, 2006.
Wow.. my past experiences with Dell Hardware Technical Support have been brutal, painful, drawn-out phone calls, lasting hours, with re-calls because of incomplete tasks or dissatisfaction.
Called Dell when I got home from work... went right to the Bangalore call center (come on.. you KNOW where they are... and THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL you are going to tell me that the people I talked to are REALLY named Marvin and Jorge).
Marvin actually listened to my description of the problem and transfered me to a special team that just handled my type of hardware (I don't know if I should be pleased that they have a team devoted to this computer, or that perhaps they HAD to build a team because of all of the problems they have had).
One hour and I was all up and running. No explanation, but the USB ports in the box went kaflewie. Device Manager thought they were OK, so the OpSys didn't find any issues... but nothing plugged into the USB ports worked.
What was the fix?
1) Turn off the machine. Disconnect the power cord. Hold down the power-on button for at least 5 seconds.
2) Open-up the case, locate the small, disc lithium battery on the mother board and pull it, wait a few seconds and put it back.
Re-attach the power cord, power it up (you'll get boot errors about the clock not being set and the floppy diskette not working - that would be because the machine doesn't have one - easily fixable) wait for the machine to boot into Windows and ... Ta Da... Everything is back to normal.
Other than trying to get the lithium battery out of the holder on the motherboard... painless.