My Mom's boyfriend took his HP Pavilion Laptop into Best Buy because he had just purchased an HP 4200 printer/scanner/copier and it would not work. The first thing that ticked me off was the day before they tried to sell him a usb cable to go with the scanner and told him $30 was the cheapest he would find. Needless to say I gave him one.
So anyhow, he takes his new scanner in because the guy who sold it to him said he didn't really "work" at best buy, he worked for HP Development. Yeah ok. So they took his laptop behind the counter and scanned it using their top notch scanners to give him this 5 page printout of the things wrong with his pc and why the scanner/printer would not work. It listed 3 viruses that haven't been around since one of which was fairly not even heard of. They also listed him needing to upgrade his memory, almost out of hard drive space, blah, blah.
So he asked them how much it would cost to fix the virus issue so his printer/scanner would work and they told him $199 and they would need his laptop for a week. He called me, I said um, NO, bring it over to me. I looked at the sheet they gave him, looked up the 3 supposed viruses, and followed two of the manual removal instructions. They are no where to be found on this laptop. I turned off system restore, ran virus scanning with brand new virus identifiers in safe mode for 6 different virus scanning companies, including Avast, Symantec, Trend. I also ran spyware which found just the usual cookie, you know the horrible bad info retrievers.
The reason his scanner/printer did not work is because when you hook up the scanner/printer in about 30 seconds it tries to install it and it says "this hardware may not work properly because it requires a 2.0 usb port". Hmmmm, imagine that. Like the GEEK SQUAD didn't see that message come up as it comes up every single time you plug that printer into the usb port.
So I downloaded usb 2.0 update drivers for his laptop, reinstalled the printer software (even though they told him he might have a broken scanner/printer (that they just sold him) or a (bad cd) - geee, seemed to work fine for me. I think it is absolutely outrageous that the GEEK SQUAD is legally allowed to charge $199 for something they do not even understand.
So what, charge the customer $199 to remove non-existant drivers, and then what? Talk him into a new laptop because they don't know how to fix it, or refuse to give a refund because they did "remove the viruses". I have been a network engineer/administrator and desktop support for almost 15 years, and I learn something everyday.
Today I learned to stay way away from the GEEK SQUAD and to let anyone I know to follow in my footsteps (ha ha, not like I would let them touch any equipment I own anyhow) but you never know about my relatives. People are much better off to read about how to fix their own computers because usually it's not as bad as it looks and go buy some half decent virus protection and just make sure it stays updated.
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