My Angel & Patrick Swayze: Both gone way too soon

I lost my very special friend on the 9th. It's hurting my heart worse than I could have ever imagined. I can't even bear to rewrite what happened. She meant so much to me. If you'd like to read what I wrote, you can click here. I will love you forever my Cindie Angel. You are so missed ♥

Because of my personal loss I haven't really been online much. It's been a hard thing for me to deal with and I haven't even kept up with my news. I think that it's making me more depressed though. The lack of writing I mean. It's something that makes me very happy and in some ways, keeps me sane. So today I decided that I needed to get back "in my zone". I did read the news. That helped some.

I heard about Patrick Swayze passing away the day it happened but like I said, I wasn't really me...

It wasn't really shocking to me that he died. He'd been sick for awhile and the last time I saw him on TV he looked pretty bad. It's sad the way disease's wear away at you. It breaks my heart. He had pancreatic cancer. He died on the 14th. He was only 57.

Don't call Dell for help

A couple of weeks ago our hard drive crashed on our computer. It was a huge loss for us; pictures, music, programs...all gone. I cried a lot. Luckily we were still under warranty with Dell. We contacted them and they sent a technician out to replace our hard drive. That's where our real trouble began.

First, the hard drive they brought to replace our old one is smaller than the one we had. Second, the programs, including Microsoft Works (which I used often), were not on any of the disks that they sent to "bring us back to original status".

I could have lived without a few of them; the movie maker, Power DVD, some games. But I wanted my MS Works back. Like I said, I used it often. Daily. That's when the phone game began...

We called Dell at least 30 times. We left voice messages to please return our call. Do you think we got even one phone call in return? No.

When we did actually get a live person on the phone, all we got was transferred to another computer or connected to someone in the Philippines that had no idea how to help us. We finally got a hold of one woman who told us we didn't have MS Works on our computer originally. We did. We bought the computer brand new. No one had it before us. We didn't add any software. She was quite rude and said "I'll send you a copy of the invoice so that you can see it wasn't on there."

We are not stupid people. We did not add anything to our computer. It came with MS Works on it. I repeat, we did not add it ourselves.

So I ended up going to the Dell website, again, and looked up our original computer configuration. What do you think I found? Yep, MS Works. So I called them again. Still no help. I was told they would NOT replace the software and that I was wrong, we did not originally have it on our PC, even though it was right in front of me that we did. Needless to say, I'm disgusted with Dell.

Later that same night I received a call from 'Private Caller'. I usually ignore those calls but something made me answer it. The lady told me I could get a free word processing program online and because I need a word processing program I got it. It's actually not bad. It's called Open Office. You can click here to check it out. It's definitely not as good as MS Works but it's an OK replacement. Most of the templates have to be downloaded and there aren't nearly as many as MS Works has, but like I said, it's OK.

I will never call Dell for help again. I will also never recommend Dell to anyone that I know. The computer is good but the service sucks. They are no help whatsoever.