Geek Squad Experience
I think we have all seen the little Volkswagon Bugs plastered with their oval logo. Or their vans, all decked out in black, white, and orange. If you have ever been to BestBuy you can’t even purchase a DVD player without the offer of a Geek Squad ‘Double Agent’ to come and install the item. They offer in home diagnosis of computer problems and can do computer repairs.
I have heard of others having poor experiences with Geek Squad. My brother Ryan had a computer gone for 12 weeks. Each day a new excuse as to why it wasn’t done. The other day one of the computers at our floral show was on the fritz. In fact, two were. I went to look at the computers but was only able to dedicate a limited time to my diagnosis. Not being able to complete the repair the choice was made to call Geek Squad. They needed to have the computer fixed and it made sense to have someone come over that was a ‘computer expert’ and would make ‘house calls’.
Geek Squad arrived and went to work addressing the problems. First, was a computer that was being plagued by pop-ups. Whenever I went to diagnose the problem no pop-ups happened and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary in the processes list. Geek Squad looked at the computer and said that the hard drive had bad sectors and the computer needed to be replaced. Well, that may be true, but bad sectors don’t cause pop-ups. They found the first thing wrong and the first suggestion was to replace the computer. Not even just replace the hard drive, the whole computer needed to be new.
They then spent a few hours looking at the next computer. This computer needs to use the modem, and what was happening was that the modem would work for a short time, and then stop working. When you would try to make a call, it would say the telephony service had an error, and restarting the telephony service didn’t help. Geek Squad still hasn’t figured it out. I am waiting for them to say that we need a new computer or it will take 12 weeks in their shop.
The point is they never did address the problems that we asked them to. It seems they just want to ‘up-sell’ the consumer. In addition their diagnosis cost was enough that I would have expected more. Has anyone had a good Geek Squad experience?
Tags: Random, Server Administration, Windows
July 14th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
My GPS has a Geek Squad warranty. The heat down here frys the GPS and each time it breaks they replace it. But not before they ask me stupid, demeaning questions such as “Have you tried pushing the reset button?”