[Ranger802008]

right, Best Buy doesn't make the products...just sells them

[gurnage]

I wish I had read these posts before we went to Geek squad to recover files on a corrupt external hard drive. It has taken four weeks just to find out if they can recover it and the quotes we have gotten have ranged from 1,000 apart. It's ridiculous. My husband dropped off the disk and 2 weeks later they are saying we need to fill out a form to get started. Well why didn't you give it to him when we was there? We both work full time and don't have time to keep going to the store. I'll let you know how our files look when we get them. Arrgh.

[~Candy~]

Wow, I hope that data is that important

[zx10guy]

You're wasting your time thinking Best Buy is going to be able to recover that data. You need to go to a company which specializes in data recovery. Ontrack. But the data needs to be very important as these services are not cheap. Ontrak has software on their website which you can download to see if the software will be able to recover the data. This provided it's just a corrupt area on the drive platter and not an outright failure of the entire drive. If the software can get the data off, you just pay for the unlock key to enable the data recovery function. Otherwise you can send the drive off to Ontrack where they can do everything up to pulling your drive platters and installing them in another working hard drive.

[roliax]

I work at a place that does follow up survey's after people have had service at Geek Squad 90% of the people we speak with are not happy and feel ripped off and mislead and usually the problem is still there. Of that 90% at least 75% have the same exact problem they bought a laptop from Best Buy the Monitor Screen cracked and Best Buy won't cover it via the Service Plan and the Manufactuer won't cover it either. I hear this 100 times a day. I mean its litterally everyone on any brand of PC but especially HP and ACER.

I like how this guy joins just to post this desite the data is either extremely exagerrated or comletely made up. 75% of all people who have problems with computers have a cracked screen!?!?! I always thought they mostly came from viruses...

[~Candy~]

I think he meant 75% of the 90% who replied to their survey

[ignatzqweep]

The Geek Squad totally sucks! I purchased a Gateway last week and within hours I received an IRQL error. I brought it back the next day and got an in-store card (opened product). WTF! So I wait a few days for a new batch of computers to get in and get a replacement Gateway. I need multimedia and HPs suck IMHO. I paid for optimization (removing all the crapware I don't want) and had them install a PCI adapter. Not that I don't know how, but I was being lazy. Well, I get it home and wouldn't you know it, the driver was improperly installed. I called 1800 Geeksquad because I was stupid enough to purchase their blacktie support for 3 years for $535 (I must have been high--I don't know what I was thinking). The "command control" geek told me I would have to pay to have them walk me through it or have someone come to my home to fix. It's not part of the freakin' $535 plan I just paid. I know how to fix it: uninstall the driver, take apart the PC and remove the PCI adapter, install the driver and reinstall the PCI adapter. So what did I just pay them for? What a freakin' waste of money! My husband's there right now trying to get our $535 back. If they don't, we will dispute the charges on our credit card. Serves them right, those bloodsuckers!

[new tech guy]

If you knew what you were doin i wouldnt have bought anything, just brought it home and did it myself. Honestly, i will never buy a pc there again nor let them touch a pc i own with a 40 foot pole.

[gurutech]

I've bought a couple laptops from BB over the past year or so. Didn't have any problems with the hardware, but the salesmen were total idiots. The most recent one I bought (actually helped my mom buy it, since the one I gave her (IBM 600) died with a 192 error...

I told her not to buy the "extra" warranty, as most laptops will fail within the first year, and that's covered by the manufacturer. And the salesman said that this particular laptop came with only the OS, and nothing else, not even SAV or the Office 2007 trial version, but when I turned it on to start copying all her crap from the old hard drive (gotta love those USB to IDE adapters!), it started loading and installing the SAV, Office, etc....

And then it started with over 400mb of Office/Vista patches!

But for $500, it was a good laptop... so good that the first BB store we went to didn't have any, but looked it up online and found that 2 other stores close to us had them, so we went to another store, and found a guy there who wanted the same laptop, but they said they didn't have any and to go to another store (which was even further away!!) We put up a stink about it, and they eventually "found" 2 laptops (one for the other guy and one for us) that other people had put on hold, but never came to pick them up.

And while waiting in line to pay, we saw a few people bringing in their PC for service, and one guy was complaining that his Gateway laptop wouldn't charge the battery - so the guy plugs in his AC adapter, sees it doesn't work, then tries their "universal" adapter, which doesn't work either, then says "We'll have to send this out." Haven't they ever heard of trying another battery???

[new tech guy]

Yeah i guess i could look at it that way, its really not bestbuy's fault. That is why when a business starts up i think it should stay small, because when it gets big it will not care about its customers anymore.

[JohnWill]

If you guys haven't heard of The PC Decrapifier, you need to look into it. I run this whenever I get a new machine in here. It's a painless way to remove all the junk and get the machine into "fighting trim".

[new tech guy]

Originally Posted by JohnWill

If you guys haven't heard of The PC Decrapifier, you need to look into it. I run this whenever I get a new machine in here. It's a painless way to remove all the junk and get the machine into "fighting trim".

I have heard of it and used it on my hp when i first received it actually. I had to do a few things by hand but not much .

[JStergis]

I never actually buy a new machine. I've rebuilt many of mine, but never had to buy or build a completely new one.

The time might be coming to replace my thinkpad, though. I'll probably buy one off newegg at that point, definitely another thinkpad though.

Specs as of Monday (just ordered some parts) on my desktop will be:

IBM Netvista 'M42'
2.0 GHz P-4
NVidia GeForce 6200 128MB 4x AGP Graphics
HP L1706 LCD Monitor
1.5 GB PC2100 DDR RAM
160 GB Western Digital Caviar SE 8MB Cache ATA/100 HDD
Lite-On Tech 20X DVD Burner (Bay 1)
48X CD-ROM HL Data (Bay 2)
10 USB 2.0 Ports
SoundBlaster Live! Digital Out to Boston Acoustics Digital Media Theater 2.1 sysem
Analogue Out to Pioneer Receiver
Running XP Pro

Not top or even middle of the line any more, but it's relatively modern, and plenty powerful for what I do with it.

[RedHelix]

Originally Posted by zx10guy

You're wasting your time thinking Best Buy is going to be able to recover that data. You need to go to a company which specializes in data recovery. Ontrack. But the data needs to be very important as these services are not cheap. Ontrak has software on their website which you can download to see if the software will be able to recover the data. This provided it's just a corrupt area on the drive platter and not an outright failure of the entire drive. If the software can get the data off, you just pay for the unlock key to enable the data recovery function. Otherwise you can send the drive off to Ontrack where they can do everything up to pulling your drive platters and installing them in another working hard drive.

Best Buy contracts data recovery services to Ontrack. That's why it's taking so long and will cost so much.

Thanks for playing

[~Candy~]

Originally Posted by JStergis

I never actually buy a new machine. I've rebuilt many of mine, but never had to buy or build a completely new one.

The time might be coming to replace my thinkpad, though. I'll probably buy one off newegg at that point, definitely another thinkpad though.

Specs as of Monday (just ordered some parts) on my desktop will be:

IBM Netvista 'M42'
2.0 GHz P-4
NVidia GeForce 6200 128MB 4x AGP Graphics
HP L1706 LCD Monitor
1.5 GB PC2100 DDR RAM
160 GB Western Digital Caviar SE 8MB Cache ATA/100 HDD
Lite-On Tech 20X DVD Burner (Bay 1)
48X CD-ROM HL Data (Bay 2)
10 USB 2.0 Ports
SoundBlaster Live! Digital Out to Boston Acoustics Digital Media Theater 2.1 sysem
Analogue Out to Pioneer Receiver
Running XP Pro

Not top or even middle of the line any more, but it's relatively modern, and plenty powerful for what I do with it.

10 USB ports Whatever for............