If You Could Only Talk to Product Support While Cycling

So I'm still slaving away over the #@! hard drive on my main computer, trying to get it reformatted. And it always galls me when I have to get to the point of calling product support because you know, I actually used to work in the computer industry and fancy myself not a complete novice on these devices (my first day of work at Microsoft in 1988, I arrived at my desk to find a PC in pieces with cards I needed to install, and mind you I had only worked on Macintoshes and mainframes before that!).

So here I am, an hour into a chat session with a product support specialist from heaven knows where on earth, and after succinctly stating my problem:

I quote directly from the chat session: "I have already tried to install Windows from the reinstallation disk, and it doesn't even let me get to the page with the partitions before I get the blue screen of death and the following error:

REGISTRY_ERROR STOP: 0X00000051"

so then an HOUR into the session after various dorking around, the support person tries to get me to run install from the reinstallation disk, and after my protestations that I already did, they make me do it again and then ask me what error message I get. I type in the above error code, AGAIN, and finally we can proceed. However, that was half an hour ago, and now I've been bumped up to a supervisor who maybe knows something about something.

If I could only do all of this while on my bike trainer, it wouldn't feel like such a monumental waste of time but I'm stuck sitting here for the duration - 1:30 and counting.

The good news is that I always buy my computers from Dell, and Dell product support has not once failed me, and I'm probably the pickiest support customer on earth. So I have faith that all of these efforts will not be in vain and I will indeed get my hard drive back and operational, eventually...