Repairs...

[buzz]

My computer has been at Best Buy for 5 days now, but only because it's under warranty.
When I took it in I told them it was the drive, a hardware failure.  My written description was disk failure, replace drive and load software, Win7 (with Service Pack) and IE9.1.  I have backups of my personal files.
I stopped there yesterday for a status.  It was sitting under the counter with a work order from Wednesday clearly marked "Hardware Failure" contact customer. 
So it was there, I never got notified, and they ignored the form I had to fill out and sign.
 
On the bright side, their staff was very nice.
If I need repairs in the future, anyone have a recommendation ?

[Robert Pauly]

I've got a guy - drop it off at my house.

[psychomom]

Stevan Ranney
Out of his house in Oak Park....708-420-3796.

[dualref]

 You have to be very careful when letting store repair departments look at/work on your computer.
I sometimes build systems for friends and repair computers. A woman came to be with a Toshiba laptop that she said she had to the Office Depot repair center and they told her they must have drained a quart of water out of it, the motherboard was fried and let a salesman show you a new computer. Hmmm.

She then took the computer to Frye's and they told her that the motherboard is shot, she needs a new computer.  Let us get you a salesman from our computer department.

She then took it to Best Buy withe the Geeks and they told her the CPU was blown, she needed a new computer.  They also were having a sale on laptops that week.

So she let me have a look at it. I took it apart and didn't see any watermarking at all on any of the internal labels (the woman said it never got wet so she has no idea what they were talking about with the water in the machine). When I turned the computer on I got a "Hard Disk Not Found" error. The machine was two years old and the cheap ass Maxxtor hard disk failed. I put in a larger Western Digital hard disk and reloaded the system and here we are  three years later with no more problems.

What is wrong with this picture? I'll tell you what, Best Buy, Frye's &  Office Depot get their computer techs from the sales floor.  You have to have 6 months sales experience before you can become one of their techs.

So these companies aren't into repairing your computer, they are there to sell you a new computer.

The moral is  find yourself  an honest (and some of them aren't) independent  computer tech and stick with them. Remember behind every good computing experience is a great computer tech.

[chandasz]

That's why I only buy Apple.....

[seebee]

I'm sure more than one person is baffled at how someone can spend so much time taking a laptop around town trying to figure out what they could probably diagnose in their own home in about half an hour. The web is far more than porn, restaurant menus, and places to shop. Just like you can type the words "ice cream shop" into a google search, you can also type in, "Toshiba laptop <modelnumber> hard disk not found." I'm sure dualref just opened it up, made sure it was seated correctly, and then tested a different hd to make sure that was the issue, and then replaced it.

Chandasz, I hope there are MANY other far more important reasons why you only buy Apple machines. Ios users have plenty  of similar horror stories.

[dualref]

Actually I ran a system diagnostic that showed the hard drive was not on any SATA channel. It was spinning though. Indication of a bad hard disk. So I couldn't even run a surface scan or anything like that. Plus Maxtor drives are not the most reliable drives around anyway.

Many people know how to use their computers, but they are clueless at what goes on behind the scenes or inside the computer.  And to tell you the truth a lot of people I encounter don't even know what a hard disk is to begin with , let alone how to use the system utilities.

And the reason the woman shopped the laptop around for awhile is that she felt that a two year old laptop should not have to be replaced so soon. When she got the $130.00 bill from me she was shocked that's all it was. Everyone else was telling her she needed a new laptop.
She was right, she didn't need a new laptop, just get the old one fixed.

I had a guy bring me a hard disk one time to ask me to diagnose it to see if it would work. I opened the box he gave me and then what was inside? A power supply!

She saved a lot of money, I made a little money everyone was happy in the end.

I also do technical support for a large liquor distributorship. Their last tech stole a few checks out of one of the desks in the office and tried to cash them. The bank had video of him trying to cash the checks in the bank lobby so he was arrested and is not cooling off in jail.