

  (Source: Engadget)
Consumer Reports/Consumerist investigation details Best Buy's worthless optimization service










Comments     Threshold


By LCS2009 on 1/5/2010 4:57:46 PM , Rating: 2
I don't live in USA but I have heard a lot of BestBuy and GeekSquad. They are trying to open a lot of stores in Europe now, so my questions are:
1-Best Buy and Geek Squad are from the same company/owner or are they associated companies?
2-What's your opinion about GeekSquad? (because I read a lot of bad things about BestBuy in this comments already)
3-What type of service does GeekSquad offer?
4-Have you test that "optimization program" by yourself? How was it?
5-Did you work in GS or BB? Waht can you tell about it?

RE: So...?
By morphologia on 1/5/2010 6:06:52 PM , Rating: 2
(1) Geek Squad is an extra service provided as a subsidiary of Best Buy. They're part of the BB brand.
(2) Geek Squad can provide useful help in a minority of cases, but most of it is charging for things you can do yourself by actually reading the instructions.
(3) Geek Squad offers hardware and software installation and troubleshooting, both in-store and to your door. Some people are paying for them to wire up their home theater system with the wall-mounted speakers and multi-channel A/V receiver. Others are essentially paying to have someone defrag their harddrive, empty their recycle bin and run a built-in application they already have.
(4) I myself have had to "un-fix" such an optimization made to my mother's PC. I'm not sure how they sleep at night having people on their payroll whose idea of optimization is compressing the hard drive and downgrading the main account to non-power-user status.
(5) I have friends who work in Best Buy and they admit that though some Geeks have real knowledge and are helpful, most are just pushing the company's product with no regard to whether the service is helpful or even necessary.


Related Articles
