Off The Walt

I’ve had a rough couple weeks, technologically-speaking.

I’ve had numerous problems with my main production computer… when I play any kind of large video or animation, it just locks and the screen turns black. The audio keeps playing for about 2 minutes, oddly. So yes, I reinstalled the drivers. I even swapped video cards with my wife. The old one from my system (nVidia) works fine in her system and hers, now in mine (ATI) still gives me the same issue, so I know it’s not video. I suppose it could be RAM, Motherboard or Processor, but that’s all it could be. I downloaded memtest and I’ll try to run the machine through that overnight or tomorrow or something, to rule that out.

I told my wife I was buying a new machine soon… this one is like 4 months old and I’m running out of patience.

So anyway, Earthlink.

I’ve had Earthlink for more than 4 years here. I set it up at my mother’s house maybe 6 years ago. Never a problem until the past 3 weeks or so. Somewhat at random, seemingly triggered by continous amounts of file transfer/download, the connection stalls, yielding nothing, the ACT light stays unlit. You actually have to turn it off and on 2-5 times to get the connection back.

After talking to the Indian support dozens of times, they started downgrading my service slower and slower trying to see if there was too much data up/down the pipe. Mind you, I don’t bittorrent unless it’s a linux distro or something… nothing nefarious. Most of the drop outs are when I’m playing Guild Wars/Magic Online or something like that… I just bought a GPS… the maps update is 2+ gigs. I get about 150 megs and the connection stalls/resets. Understand I’ve got a downstream of 384k now, down from 6 megs (burst). I try to be patient, but sometimes I think things were easier when we used to fight over who would get on the monkey bars first.

Well the downgrade to smoke signal-speed DSL didn’t work. I still get interrupted connections and upon further complaining to Earthlink, they finally told me there was nothign they could do for me and refused further support. I never yelled or was nasty. I know they’re just doing their jobs. I got a supervisor and told me they reached the extent of their support. They have officially refused me support. Refused. REFUSED! They cannot fix my service that I pay ~$50 for and because they ran out of bullet points, they simply refuse support to me?

I’m not trying to be a creedist, but I rarely find acceptable customer service outside of America. I’ve gotten Aussies in the past, they were usually quite good. It’s rare I speak to those down under, though.

So I have the option of spending money on something hardly better than dialup or going to cable. So many complain about Comcast and I’m about to accept it like a hot cheerleader on a Friday night.

I went to high school with some Seminoles, perhaps I should ask them how to make smoke signals.