Zel-kun’s Words

I’ve been shopping at Best Buy for as long as I’ve been working.  If I bought a game, music, or a PDA, it has likely come from the land of blue shirts and yellow tags.  Best Buy is a decent enough store, I can usually find what I’m looking for there, and the price isn’t too bad.

I also bought my first laptop from there, complete with an extended warrantee.  The laptop and warrantee now belong to Zai, I sold it to her a couple years ago when I realized I really couldn’t justify having a laptop.  Since then we’ve made good on the warrantee a couple times, replacing a fan, the screen, a battery, and a power cord.  The warrantee easily paid for itself.  I never had a problem with it, until now…

I took a look at Zai’s laptop, and saw that the polygons in World of Warcraft were flickering.  This concerned me because I bought the laptop explicitely so it could run World of Warcraft.  It has well beyond the reccomended specs (Even checked the specs on the new Burning Crusade, which are roughly the same).  And it ran the game flawlessly for a long time.  So there must be something wrong.

After hours of finding and downloading new drivers (and old drivers, seeing if a rollback would work, I got nowhere fast.  So I brought it up to Best Buy so they could check to see if maybe the video card or system board was going bad.  They say it’ll take a week to look at.

A week.

I understand the time, but that’s a week Zai is effectively without internet access.  So we can’t play WoW or do anything else online, so it puts a damper on my daily activities.  So we go to pick it up the next week, and on the laptop is a note:

‘Laptop does not meet specifications for game.’

I raise an eyebrow, this is obviously a load of crap.  I walk into the aisle, grab a copy of WoW Burning Crusade, and show it to the member of ‘Geek Squad’ behind the counter.  I show him the problem the game is having, and show him the specs for the game.  He admits that the laptop exceeds all the recommended specs, and decides to run a quick system diagnostic (a dumbed-down version of what was SUPPOSED to be run when we sent it out).

After thirty seconds, it finds several bad hard drive sectors, and he admits that he can hear the hard drive clicking very softly, and that a flickering polygon can indeed be caused by a dying drive.

Its nice to know that wherever he sent it, whether it be Geek Squad HQ (which I suspect by the logo on the packing slip) or HP, they didn’t even bother to look at it.

As a man who fixes computers for a living, this makes me pretty upset.  I would be fired and put on the street in a heartbeat if my boss caught me returning a computer without going through a proper testing proceedure.

So the ‘Geek’ said he’d replace the hard drive and image it in the store, and said it would take two or three days (I would have expected a better turnaround to a customer who just wasted a week, especially considering he gave me the drive so I could perform my own data backup and transfer).

So Zai comes to pick up her laptop last night, and I wake up in the morning to receive a message from her that the scrollbar on her touchpad is not working.

Way to go Best Buy.

You guys suck.

Disclaimer: My anger is not directed toward the helpful ‘Geek’ behind the counter.  He was very friendly and I was nothing but polite towards him.  Its towards an organization that has effectively jerked me around for a week and a half now.