- Report: #436336
Complaint Review: BEST BUY GEEK SQUAD - Panama City Florida
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BEST BUY GEEK SQUAD
1000 E 23rd Street Panama City, Florida, U.S.A.
Phone:
850-767-5979
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BEST BUY GEEK SQUAD Distroyed my computer Panama City Florida
On January 2008 I took my computer to have it tweeked. When I returned to get my computer I was informed that it was so infected that they did not know if they would be able to restore it. What they didn't know was I had ran three virus scans before taking it in and I knew it did not have viruses.
I had to take it to a computer repairman to try and restore the computer, which it did and he discovered the computer was crashed by them. After finally receiving my back-ups from them, we installed them and found that they did not back-up the program files so all my data was no good unless I had the actual program file to work with. I lost half of my pictures, legal documents, address book, etc.
I called them and was informed that they never backed up the program files. So here I am with a computer with no program files, but data files that won't work at all. I know I should have investigated them more, but TV made them look like they were trained professionals --- NOT.
So my advise to anyone who even thinks about taking anything to them -- DON'T.
J ****
Saint George Island, Florida
U.S.A.
I had to take it to a computer repairman to try and restore the computer, which it did and he discovered the computer was crashed by them. After finally receiving my back-ups from them, we installed them and found that they did not back-up the program files so all my data was no good unless I had the actual program file to work with. I lost half of my pictures, legal documents, address book, etc.
I called them and was informed that they never backed up the program files. So here I am with a computer with no program files, but data files that won't work at all. I know I should have investigated them more, but TV made them look like they were trained professionals --- NOT.
So my advise to anyone who even thinks about taking anything to them -- DON'T.
J ****
Saint George Island, Florida
U.S.A.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Rippedoff
Milwaukee,Wisconsin,
U.S.A.
Geek Squad Has a Duty to Educate
#2Consumer Suggestion
Thu, March 26, 2009
I'm in the same business as Geek Squad--computer services for home, small office and business. I can tell you Geek Squad is ANYTHING but a "trained, professional" organization servicing this sector. Behind the black ties and cute VW Bugs is often just a college or high school novice who knows a few tricks. But that's the innocuous part--the people who really know what's going on are trained to SELL SELL SELL, even if what they are upselling doesn't give the consumer any value. In one case, a client of mine went to GS for a memory upgrade that should have cost about $60, installed. By the time she left, they had upsold her bill to over $250 on a 4-year-old PC by convincing her that she needed things like the "PC cleaning service" for $40. For this price she watched as they took 90 seconds to run a vacuum cleaner hose around the inside of the system unit. Wow, thats $1,600 per hour! Good work if you can get it. In the case of the submitter, it sounds like they should have educated him as to what could happen (loss of his software), encouraged him to locate software install disks for his PC and (once the extent of the infection became clear) not touched his PC if this crucial recovery media couldn't be located. Also, once it became clear to GS that the infection was worse than at first thought, they should have immediately contacted the customer with the new diagnosis, explained to him the risks and cost of recovery and informed him it might actually be safer and more cost-effective to round up all recovery media and then rebuild the customer's OS image than to try to fight what was evidently a very bad spyware infection. It appears, also, that the customer wasn't properly apprised of the difference between viruses and spyware, leaving him to think that they were ripping him off in disinfecting his PC when his previous three virus scans showed it clean. And, of course, there are always "zero-day threat" viruses that bypass AV software, the problem of keeping software definitions current, and on and on. (I have to say, one has to wonder if the customer really came up with a clean virus scan, what drove him to scan two more times? Virus scans are notoriously time-consuming.) Sounds to me like GS, in their drive to get the client's cash, failed in their duty to 1) warn him of risks and not take on a job that was too risky, 2) educate him on what the threat was and the action required and then 3) keep him apprised and in the decision loop. Typical Geek Squad, alas.
