On 2008-12-23, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

[ ... ]

A freind of mine bought a new dell earlier this year. I installed some
A/V and anti spyware software for them. They moved north nd had to
change to Verison for their DSL provider. As soon as they turned the
computer on it started to download & install a bunch of crap from
Verison. It crashed during their force feed, so they called Verison tech
support.

Hmm ... I presume that you mean "Verizon" (with a 'z' not an
's').

I wonder what they would do trying to force-feed their software
to my SPARC-based Solaris and OpenBSD based systems. Nothing running
Windows of any flavor, nor even the Mac Mini are allowed to directly
touch my net interface. :-)

They let them do a remote session, and proceeded to screw it
up, even worse.

They probably would not have any idea how to deal with the unix
systems on my end. :-) And I would *not* give them a password on my unix
boxen. If their DSL box isn't enough to handle it, then I won't play.

Of course, I've been resisting their attempts to sell me FIOS
(Their name for a Fiber Optic feed) with the excellent excuses that:

1) They can't (won't) give me static IP addresses.

2) They can't (won't) give me a Class-C subnet (256 IP addresses).

We never got to the point of whether they required a Windows box
on my end. :-)

Finally, they had to pay Dell to reinstall the drivers
that disappeared, like the drives and USB ports.

Who had to pay Dell? Hopefully Verizon did.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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