How Much Help are They?

Well good evening again.  I haven't had much of a chance to watch television today as I was helping my mother with her new laptop.  Which, oddly enough, leads us to tonight's rant.


There are a couple of parts to this.  First is that her old laptop really didn't have any issues other than the battery didn't hold a charge.  When I mentioned that she could have purchased a new computer battery she started saying that she had thought of that but the guy told her it wasn't a good idea.  Imagine that, a salesman told her it wasn't a good idea to spend $50 to replace the battery and that it was a better idea to spend $500 on a new laptop.  Keep in mind that this laptop is only 4 years old and was a fairly beefy machine when she purchased it.  The store you may be asking?  Well, their commercials always state that their sales team doesn't work on commission.  Based on this they work on something much like it at Best Buy.


The second part has to do with the fact that she followed through with the purchase of the laptop.  They then told her that for somewhere around $100 they could create a disk to transfer all of her files and programs to the new computer.  Sounds like a great idea except for a couple of problems.  The first problem was that the previous laptop is running Windows Vista and the new Windows 7.  There are a lot of changes between the 2 versions of the OS that prevent this from happening the way that they promised.  The next problem with this is that it wasn't something that they were going to do for her.  They took the old laptop and created some disks that were supposed to do this magic.  The third part of the problem was that after allowing the process of "restoration" to run for several hours, it was clear that this was a waste of time.  All this process did was create a directory of the files on the new laptop.  The worst part was that the files weren't even useful once they were copied.  I ended up deleting this directory and copying the necessary files manually.  The last part of the problem is that I could have done all of this for free in a matter of a couple of hours.  I am going to have to do this anyway as this "backup" that they created didn't really back up the data piece of things correctly.  The several hours that we waited for this to run was mostly for a couple of programs with all of the data.  With these programs that we supposedly "restored" were not functional nor was the data anywhere to be found.


So the conclusion of all this?  The Geek Squad may be able to repair a computer but don't count on them to actually help when you purchase a new computer.  Just expect them to hold there hand out for something that you can easily do for free on your own.  Don't be in the same situation as my mother who went in with a $50 problem and come out after spending $600...