This guy’s obviously had some bad experiences with Best Buy’s Geek Squad. Maybe he didn’t shop at my best buy, I dunno. I’ve been happy with my experiences with the geek squad in the past, but I’m happy because they screwed things up, and then made it right.
I initially took my laptop in because it was crashing. I reported that the error that windows was displaying was a hard drive error, usually associated with a head crash on the primary drive. I told them I wanted them to verify that it was the hard drive, and if so, to replace it. They told me they had to send it out to a repair facility, so I was without my laptop for two weeks. When I got it back, same old problem. Turned out, all their repair facility did was steal my 200$ ram chip and reset the bios on the machine. They never put the hard drive through its paces.
I took it back to Best Buy the day after I got it back from the “repairs” and cornered the guy that I’d picked it up from, because he seemed to be willing to realize that I was a geek and I had more than half a clue. I explained my problem to him again, gave him a copy of the error message and made very clear “I will not send this machine to your repair facility again. I want my ram chip found and returned or replaced and I want you to do everything in your power to make my hard drive crash, it will. When it does, replace it per my warranty agreement.” His response was, “Why didn’t we do this in the first place?” to which I could only answer, “I have no idea.”
The trick with doing anything with your computer when you take it to someone else for repairs is to know exactly what you want fixed and have them tell you how they are going to do it. If you don’t like how they are going to do it, take the machine to someone else or do it yourself. The average computer repair isn’t that hard. If my laptop hadn’t been under warranty and best buy hadn’t owed me a free hard drive in trade for the wrecked one, I would have replaced it myself and gone on about life. Replacement of major components is easy. If you have bigger problems than that, it’s probably time to think about a new PC anyway, and if you’re insisting upon fixing it, the best way to do it, is to figure out how to do it yourself so that if it gets messed up, you have no one else to blame.
I suppose there is one other difference between me and this poor guy who had a bad experience at Geek Squad though.
I backed up all of my data on my hard drive, even though the drive was failing, before I took it in.
