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Catch 22 in computer world

By JOHN MUNFORD

Broken hard drive under warranty? That’ll be $116, please.

Dell calls it “Customer Care.”

I call it, “A load of hooey.”

It all started when I got the dreaded “blue screen of death” on my Dell desktop computer. After much wrangling with tech support, the verdict came in: the hard drive had gone bad. It will be replaced free of charge under warranty.

Over a week later, after spending about 10 hours fussin’ cussin’ and doing everything but throwing my Dell out the window, a contractor came by and installed the new hard drive.

Then he began to walk away with my old one.

Not so fast, I said. Turns out Dell wants my old hard drive back, and if I don’t return it in the postpaid box they provided, they will charge me $116.

The problem with returning my broken/defective hard drive is that it still contains my personal banking information and other data which could be used to steal my identity.

Call me Chicken Little will you? Check the Internet for yourself. Turns out studies (reported by such reputable publications as PC World, etc) have been done where techies have collected old discarded hard drives and recovered financial and personal information.

Even if you have formatted your hard drive, your information is still intact, but the operating system is unable to decode it. Since the info still lingers, it is still there, ripe for the plucking.

The U.S. Department of Defense, by the way, requires a rigorous “wipe” process be applied to all old hard drives, where new data is overwritten over the old so the old info can’t be recovered. That is, when they don’t want to shred the hard drive entirely with some special contraption.

If the government’s that paranoid about hard drive data, we should be too. Especially with all the computer-savvy criminals out there these days.

A police sergeant once recounted to me how many hours he spent trying to clean up his financial records after his identity was hijacked. It went into the hundreds of hours.

Frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my life.

So I got to wondering why in the world Dell wants my hard drive back so darned much. Then it hit me. The “new” hard drive they gave me was a refurbished part.

Would Dell want to repair my faulty hard drive and give it to another Dell customer, who could then potentially rape my financial identity?

No, my Dell technician told me last week. “We will destroy it.”

So why in the world, I asked, does Dell need my hard drive back so darned much?

He couldn’t answer. After I stubbornly refused to mail away the faulty hard drive, he said he’d get back to me. Haven’t heard from him in a week.

In a way, I hope they do try to charge me for the hard drive, as I’ll make them drag their high-priced attorneys down here to Fayette Magistrate Court with a small-claims filing. I have a feeling it won’t get that far, as one “customer care” rep early on offered me a $90 coupon to shrink the price of keeping my defective hard drive.

I turned down the offer. Why should I pay for a broken part that’s replaced under warranty? I will give that lady credit, though, she was as nice as could be, even if it took half an hour to convince her I needed to speak with a manager.

One would call me back, she said. But instead of calling back on my cellphone, the manager chickened out, calling back during the workday on my home phone.

The pleasant customer care lady suggested I plug the old hard drive in and wipe off the information using a software utility. Sure, I’m going to fuss around my computer’s guts and void what’s left of this almost worthless Dell warranty? I don’t think so.

Now I’ve gone through the hours of reinstalling programs and other data onto the new “refurbished” hard drive. Wonder if I could get a techie to check that drive out and see if someone else’s personal information is on it.

If Dell’s lawyers were smart, they’d get on this policy problem in a jiffy. Who knows how many faulty Dell drives are out there with customers’ personal information still intact?

Sounds like a helluva lawsuit to me. Looks like I was right to keep the hard drives from our family’s previous computers also.

Meanwhile, the rest of you out there, especially you all with digital cameras, should take heed. Back up all your photos and other important data on multiple CDs. I was really glad I did.

Protect yourself, people, and don’t let a big company like Dell flimflam you when it comes to safeguarding your privacy.