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02/27/2007

Best Buy's Geek Squad Charges $415 to Replace Hard Drive

Yes, Geek Squad actually charged a customer $415 to fix their laptop -- unsuccessfully, after Windows flashed the BSOD. This was the quote:
Price to diagnose was $69.00, OS Install $129.00, Back up transfer $99.00, NO Guarantee. Estimated repair time seven to ten days. On the 11th day, O. was given the sad news that his hard drive was fried and would need to be replaced for an extra charge of $118.00. On the 12th day, O. was given his laptop, and his non-working hard drive
[via Consumerist]

This entry was posted on 02/27/2007 8:23pm and is filed under Computers .
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There are 9 comments about this post (1 pages).

1
Posted at 02/27/2007 8:50pm by Fjolvar
That is messed up. It's pretty bad that you call them to help you and then they charge you an insane amount of money just to fix a HDD or to set up your X-Box live account... This is why you call up you local Computer store to help you, or the makers themselves.
2
Posted at 02/27/2007 8:51pm by Rayn
Wow, thats a lot of money. They weren't able to recover data though but it looks like they got the thing working with a new HDD and OS reinstall and gave them back the dead hard drive, not just gave it back to them completely broken. Not to mention, clean room data recovery is about $1900 and it doesn't even come back to you with the original document names so you have to go through everything. Pulling data off a hosed drive is also a very time consuming process and Geek Squad goes hourly. I've easily spent about 6 hours through failure after failure recovering data from corrupted hard drives. Its not easy because you can't copy some folders all at once and have to pay attention to when the process breaks and figure out manually which files and folders are corrupted and which can be saved.
3
Posted at 02/27/2007 8:59pm by Oldbrass
HoooLeee Crap. That's it. I'm officially going freelance I.T.
4
Posted at 02/27/2007 10:13pm by Wolf
what a rip- before I was doing forensics (which I do now) I was contracting mostly doing laptop repair and rebuilds- a job like that I would have charged about 200 labor (depending on how hosed it was- might have been less 200 would have been on the high end)+ parts (the HD) and it would have been done in a day if not less (usually I would rip the machine apart right in front of them and have it done in a couple of hours) $129 for an os install is ridiculous unless you are doing a custom mod for them
5
Posted at 02/28/2007 01:09am by cal geiser
just buy me lunch and i'll fix nything you want!!
6
Posted at 02/28/2007 01:45am by Verick
So.... 69$ to verify whether or not it was the hard drive that caused the problem. once they decided that the hardware had to be replaced... 118$ since this isn't fantasy land and hard drives arn't free... then 99$ to back up the info on the failing drive because you wanted them to... and you didn't wanna loose your info... and 129$ to load an OS because labor costs money and it takes them time allbeit not much.... the moral is if you don't know howto fix something it will cost you money... if you looked at the charges related to fixing a car and you were a mechanic it would sound rediculous too. So this just sounds like business to me
7
Posted at 02/28/2007 08:02am by chris
The price sounds about right, every pc repair shop around here would charge about that price (myself included), some would be more. People pay it aswell, because a) they don't know how to do the repair themselves b) They know (after telling them) they sould be backing up the hdd c) labor and parts cost money. The time scale is off though, it would take me within two days (2 if the hdd needed ordering).
8
Posted at 03/01/2007 04:07am by xsamx
no surprise here. geek squad is fu***** terrible and charges insane rates.
9
Posted at 03/03/2007 02:29am by John
Ok this is ridculous, i have a classmate that works at our local geeksquad office, and we are constantly making fun of thier prices, $129 bucks just for them to click the mouse and maybe type a couple of letters and number is stupid, takes 40 minutes tops to install OS, and $118 just to unscrew 1 screw at most come ON, i should be charging these rates. and i love the $69.99 diagnosis rate, like he couldnt tell that the drive was a goner. the fad is moving, theres the new CircutCity FireDog crew, and the new EasyTech from stapes.
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