Dell Warranty Upgrade Request Disappointment

Dell Customer Login > Your Name > Options (My Account; Order Status; My Saved Items; My Products). Go to My Product to get the list of Dell products you have bought over the years.

Select the product with warranty period nearing its end. Expand the selection and under the Support Services Status (Active and Extend or Upgrade) > Select Extend or Upgrade. I bought my laptop in 2021. It came with 2 year warranty. I thought the extension was easy and worthwhile.

Customer Support was transactional and disappointing.

I received an email from Inside Sales Representative III. It elicited the following points (personal use/business use; if business use, what is the billing organisation’s name & address; who was the end user; the system’s performance).

After I have provided the details and asked for additional help. The AI or robotic-type of answer came back promptly while successfully ignoring my other request for help. It (not sure the email was from a real person) focused on detailing the Special prices for Premium Support Contract (Onsite Hardware Part Replacement + Technical Support 24-7) for 1 year at $214 + 8% GST (total 231.12).

Disappointingly, it also detailed there are two payment modes (Credit/Debit Card over Phone; or Bank Transfer to Dell Citi Account via Direct Bank Transfer to Dell Global B.V. Singapore Branch AC 0-820826-019) SWIFT CITISGSG. The person requested sharing of paid receipt over email after bank transfer. Warranty excludes battery, accidental drop, break, damage, spill, wear and tear, and natural disaster. Price quoted is subjected to change without prior notice.

I felt that Dell’s customer very transactional engagement had expected failure (i.e., expecting the customer to abort their intention to extend their warranty).

After the episode, I have decided to quit the warranty extension. In addition, I have decided to abort my intention to buy XPS 13 laptop that was still in my shopping cart. I was disappointed with such cold transactional engagement from Dell.

Good product with lousy service is bad.

The transactions had all been via Dell’s website and over two emails. It wasted two days.

Google services lacked traceability and version control management

First stop, Google Play review. The issue is that the reviews are not reliable. There is no retention control, i.e., reviews made at different times or app versions are not retained and indicated. Why is this important? Users wanted to know if the review made is applicable to their existing versions. Furthermore, the ratings are obsolete. Those with 5 stars may have been downgraded to 2 stars over time. Just because Google failed to remove the stats that involved earlier versions, the data corrupted the overall rating calculation.

Second stop, Google Maps. The reviews made earlier are not retained. It did not indicate if there is seasonal performance issues, e.g., bad services during peak seasons. It did not retain information about management changes over time and thus performance changes. This is important because earlier good or bad reviews does not reflect current state. The dates of review may provide clue but it allowed bad assumptions to be made. That is a risk.

Third stop, YouTube. It is horrendous and incredible that YouTube belonged to Google. There are many things wrong with the current policy. The main issues that irked me are the rating of videos. As long as a video can be bumped up to few likes, it will be misleading to many users. Example, if a video has been viewed tens of thousands and garnered 100 likes. We do not know if the video is good or bad. That is because there may be 5000 likes and 4900 dislikes, i.e., around 50% performance rating but is instead displayed as 100 likes instead.

Google wants to appease the content provider, it did away with dislikes and claimed that such indicator were flawed and may be weaponised to bring down ratings of legitimate contents. BUT, such game can also be played the other way, where lousy/rubbish content providers bump up likes to disinform users of its quality and as click bait to monetise half-baked contents. For me, I preferred dislikes as an indicator of video content quality. If I view 10 videos and get 3 bad ones, that is unacceptable, esp., if I can’t warn other users.

Another issue with YouTube is its filtering and search function. It failed miserably. I get rubbish most of the time. It is getting more wrong than right. Probably my expectation has increased over time since Google superseded Netscape et al. To get anything less than 1 hit per 10 returns of my query is bad. Furthermore, content providers can mislead users by giving misleading titles to push SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) terms to profit themselves at the expense of users satisfaction. No thanks to Google SEO, yes? How many levels do I need to scroll down to find the item I wanted?

Will Google fail after years of change fatigue? Will other innovators supersede Google? User demand has changed, our response time is getting shorter and expectation higher. If Google can’t interpret its data/library and return the correct keys, it will be locked from future competitions.

Clear history from YouTube

Jump to Steps if you want fast info, else read on.

YouTube cleared my history without warning or notification to me, probably the content was removed for whatever reason(s). When I could not trace my history item, it frustrated me. What is the point of history if there is no traceability of my historical data and Google can delete at its fancy? Might as well do away with history.

Steps:

I did that. To reduce retention of history, go to YouTube > History > Click View All history > Click the top right menu icon > Manage all history > Choose account > ignore keep history makes YouTube more personal > click auto-delete (off) > choose delete activity older than > select 3 months.

That is the most frequent one available BUT you can still remove history manually, which I will do from now on. I guess that is being digitally hygienic.

View in dark theme in Google Doc helps save power and minimise eye strain but failed

When you try to trace the highlighted texts when you want to select text to bold, italicise, etc.

This is a problem when the highlight is transparent blue and the background is black. Can Google do something about this? It’s been more than few years since dark theme was introduced.

New Samsung phone before a holiday is bad idea as vacation photos ruined by its Beauty Filter

I was happy to have a new Samsung S20+ mobile before my holiday to Scotland. I took a lot of photos without looking in-depth at the quality. I trusted Samsung.

It was a big mistake. Samsung was an idiot when it made its camera setting (by default) with Beauty Filter mode (ref 1.). All my photos did not look like me because the filter rendered the photos unrecognisable. It was someone who was applying a heavy makeup for no shitty reasons. I did not see my blemishes and my smiles was creaseless (I looked like Barbie’s Mr Ken).

Another mistake was that the filter was PERMANENT! It was akin to taking a permanent marker and draw a grafiti over your only photo copy. I can’t even revert to original because there was NONE.

How stupid can Samsung be? Users can at any time apply Beauty Filter mode to their original photos and save the rendered copies separately, BUT with camera capture in Beauty mode, it force you to swallow the bitter pill of its shitty rendering algorithm without even warning you about it when you take each shoot.

So for all Samsung competitors, if you can get this camera funtion or feature right…. you have my vote of confidence in my next mobile purchase. So far my journey with mobile phones has been HTC, HTC, Samsung Note, Samsung Note, Samsung S10+, Samsung S20+, the next one is mobile without Beauty filter mode as default.

Reference

1. Beauty filter mode by Samsung
2. Bad review about its Beauty Filter since 2016 but Samsung is daft
3. Plenty of fixes to remove the shitty Beauty Filter mode. Samsung failed to consider

Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen2 laptop is bad

It runs on Intel Core i7. The full spec is available in the official site.

My machine is less than 1 year old. It has been giving me problems.

These are the problems.

1. It is hot for a laptop. It can burn my lap. I think the heat dissipation failed.
2. It is slow. This is compared based on the following personal benchmark (i.e., It hung when I tried to navigate through Windows File Explorer – which is a bad sign; It hung when I right click to create New Folder; It hung when I tried to save files via Save File As window)
3. Frequent unresponsiveness (aka hung). I had to restart at least once per week due to its unresponsiveness. I have used both HP, Dell, Samsung, NEC, etc., without such problem. Lenovo or Toshiba machine was my first machine in 2023.
4. I don’t like the touchscreen on laptop. This is the most useless feature for laptop. I don’t like touchscreen on tablet too but it is forgivable because the feature is considered native to tablet. Why I don’t like touchscreen (dirty screen, irritating when you want to wipe dust off screen, I prefer touchpad more because it has a right and left buttons to click and easy to scroll
5. Lenovo is not working very well with OneDrive. If you can do away with Desktop OneDrive, by all means remove it from the machine. However, I think OneDrive on Desktop is messed up and it is better to use Office on Web to deal with the sync problem. You may also explore using Google Drive or Dropbox, but I don’t have good experience with Dropbox and there is no smaller cloud storage with reasonable pricing as compared to Google Drive.
6. Keyboard confusion. I hate Lenovo because it has the wrong placement of Ctrl and Fn buttons. All keyboards should have keyboard the same as HP, Dell, and all other types of USB, Wireless, Bluetooth keyboards in the market. Lenovo is just being stupid by being different for useless reason. I get confused when I use Lenovo and keeps on using the Fn key as Ctrl. It is very irritating.

Note: I am using Lenovo because it was issued to me by my organisation. I had to rely on Bluetooth keyboard to ensure that I don’t get confused with the keyboard Ctrl & Fn keys misplacement. In terms of performance, Lenovo failed miserably in comparison to my personal HP machine.

Frequent upload failed error using OneDrive

I have frequent problem with OneDrive.

It occurred without fail every week. The error message “Upload failed. Your file wasn’t uploaded because your change can’t be merged with changes made by someone else”. It gave two options: Save a copy or discard changes.

I have discarded changes countless time. I have saved a copy countless times that I have versions up to over 20s. If you try to act smart by overwriting the current file, it may mess up your file real good and you will be at the mercy of trying to retrieve earlier versions hoping you had saved sufficient changes (if you remember what you have changed).

What did MS do? There is zero customer support.

How to get around this bug?

If you use Office on the web, there will not be any issue with syncing data from office suite. I have given up Desktop apps to do my work. Only when I need to have special features only available in the Desktop app version will I use the offline app.

All in all, MS is getting bloated and useless. Its customer service has given up trying to help users with such bloated features. It relied on MS support community but failed miserably because the so called experts in this community (aka forum) are those who gave generic solutions that ends up confusing users more.

For example, why do I frequently experienced problem syncing my work on Desktop Office Suite (e.g., MS Word and Excel) with OneDrive. Why do I constantly get error message that it failed to save? Why?

Anyway, the only solution I found out myself was to do your work on Office on the web, where you don’t get any problem syncing with OneDrive.

Apple is better than Android phone?

My wife uses iPhone and her switching experience was effortless. She has gotten all the profiles and apps from her old phone to the new one.

I am more tech savvy than her, and I did not enjoy the switch from Samsung S10+ to Samsung S23 Ultra. The experience was bad. These are the things that I feared most, i.e., WhatsApp, Emails, Authenticators, Government and Banking apps. Samsung was not very helpful, not even with its Samsung Switch (via wired or wireless transfer). It did not help to set up most of the apps. It only installed the apps that was on my old phone.

Issues with switching from Samsung/Android phone to another

My first shock was WhatsApp. I lost 5 days of messages when Samsung Switch did copy WhatsApp messages onto my new phone. It relied solely on backed up data, which is not real time. I had to do it manually, i.e., go to WhatsApp settings >Chats >Chat backup > Click back up (it took more than 10 minutes to complete the backup to Google Drive). I have previously opted for monthly backup because the backup sessions would frequently disrupt me from viewing my messages, especially when it was urgent. I wished WhatsApp could have been smarter and allowed background backup rather than during active sessions when users are initiating WhatsApp to view their messages in a hurry. Another issue is that I had to clear cache and memories in order to restore. So whatever discrepancies between two devices when the SIM card was transferred is lost! There is no way to consolidate backups of different timing. No thank to WhatsApp for being stupid. Consider alternatives but not perfect as well (ref. 2), unless you switch platform to iPhone and iMessage.

My suggestion to manufacturer

Phones do not work correctly when there is no SIM card. If two phones can be “synced” with just one SIM card, i.e., connected by data cable, where the functions of the new phone can be tested without transferring the SIM card (from one to another several times), it will be easy to sync and test numerous apps on the new phone (before we finalise the transfer of the SIM card from old to new phone). It would ease my worrisome mind. Alas, I had to repeatedly transfer SIM card from one phone to another until I get the issues resolved. I had to repeatedly switch on/off phones to do that (ref. 1). One example is WhatsApp. I can’t compare messages from two phones because when one phone has no SIM card, WhatsApp will automatically logout the user and render them unable to check their messages.

Tips

Don’t rely too much on Samsung Switch. It is stupid. You will get surprises subsequently. Prioritise in WhatsApp messages, backup your messages, then switch off your phone immediately to prevent any subsequent messages. Transfer SIM to new phone, setup WhatsApp there > restore. Done. For the other apps, pray hard that you don’t have to switch your SIM card back and forth to settle the issue.

Reference

1. Is it safe to remove a SIM card while your phone is on? by Quora
2. How to restore your chat history by WhatsApp
3. The best WhatsApp alternatives for 2023 by Tom’s Guide

Remove obsolete accounts from MS Authenticator

This is for Android, go to Settings > Accounts & Backup > Manage Accounts > Remove obsolete accounts.

Then go to Authenticator to to verify that these greyed out accounts are gone.

Phone developers should distinguish missed calls (> 10 sec) versus abandoned calls (< 10 sec) to help users

A note to all phone developers. This is a good feature to have, please…

When I received a miss call, I want to know how long the attempted call lasted before it was registered as missed call (especially when I don’t have a call forwarding or voice message services).

In my opinion, any attempted calls that lasted at least 10 seconds should be registered as missed calls.

In contrast, any attempted calls that lasted less than 10 seconds should be considered as abandoned calls. Abandoned calls may be due to the caller realising that they have dialed the wrong number or any persons trying to elicit a call back. The latter may be from scammers or businesses that just don’t care, e.g., the ones who hired staffs who would think that by leaving a missed call is suffice to consider that “my job is done, and the shit with this job anyway” attitude. So customers can just eat shit or call back later by getting through the cumbersome automated call attendant (aka autoattendant). You are considered lucky if you get through this within 15 min, else you will be listening to the recorded message of reassurance: “Your call is important to us, BUT unfortunately all our customer service is busy right now. You may call back later or continue to hold the line. Thank you”.

So, to phone developers, it is important for users to weed out (or filter) abandoned calls from the legitimate missed calls so that we can prioritise our call back, especially if the number is unknown, i.e., NOT in our phone registry.