I called best buy to find out the services and charges of their geek squad. 20 minutes on hold was too much.
I’m sure some of you have experience with them.
So, what are their provided computer services and how much do they charge for them?
Personally, I wouldn’t go near those guys. $159 to install a new hard drive (coming to your home to do so). I’m CompTIA A+ certified (basic hardware and software installation, etc.) and it would take me about 2 minutes and do it for free. It’s definitely a rip off.
I haven’t had any first hand experiences with them myself, but they seem to be looked down on by the IT crowd in general.
Just my two cents.
I think it runs $185 to show up at your house and that also covers the first hour then its $85 an hour after that. (But this was a year or two ago). They also have a limit as to how far they’ll travel from the store. I’ve never used them so I can’t say they’re worth the money. What are you looking to do to your computer?
They were gonna charge me about $200 for a diagnostic and proceeding power supply replacement. I took my computer to another store that ran the diagnostic for free and put in a new power supply for 30 bucks. Oh, and Geek Squad would have taken a week to install the power supply, but the other place had it done in about 2 hours.
Go somewhere else.
FTR: The diagnostic that they ran cost me $45. It wasn’t until they told me I’d have to wait a week that I said “no way” and took it to the other guys.
Whatever you do, don’t take a shower while they are in your house…
Wow. With prices like that, if you have a problem that’s going to take them more than two or three hours to fix, you may as well just buy a brand new computer instead.
I happened to have some encounters with Geek Squad management as well as some of their [del]victims[/del] customers.
Best Buy charges a lot, but pays the techs very little. Hence they have very poor quality techs. (If the techs were good and experienced, they’d go elsewhere.) I just don’t see the point of paying premium prices for a below average service.
I saw a parade of those guys on US275 South last week. I think there were maybe 15-20 vehicles ranging from Beetles to Vans to Bobtail trucks, all in a row and in the order I mentioned. They took the 5th Ave North exit in St. Pete. I think they were trying to intimidate someone who complained about them or maybe it was a repo team.
LouisB: That was probably a group going to a corporate client. Maybe doing a big install. BB started going into business computer work something like 3 years ago. The idea that a company would hire those people …
I had them come over when I was recovering from surgery and couldn’t lift the box to take it to my regular guy. He got the thing to acknowledge the existence of Windows again but not the USB ports. so he gave me an hours’ labor discount. I guess its hit or miss on quality.
[onsite computer repair service owner hat on]
Damn, not the pit…
[Resist urge to tell the world what I really think of this collection of fucknuggets.]
$199 to set up a wireless network…the most I ever had for a wireless job was $165 and that was setting up a 4 machine network from scratch including setting up the DSL. The DSL setup would have been a separate charge IIRC as well with the Weak Squad.
In a nutshell they are somehow getting away with murder, mostly because people think that a private full service shop is more expensive than the mass production environment of the big names.
My service charges $55/hour (1 hr min), $65/hr nights and weekends. My techs make $35 per billable hour they generate, but pay their own expenses/tools/etc (technically they are subcontractors). Most of the time I can give them 10-15 hours of work a week. Not bad for part time work around your school schedule type work.
Its not horribly uncommon for my guys to hit a call and fix it in 30 min or less. Stuff like the above mentioned power supply issue, $55 labor, $35+tax part, puter fixed in 15-20 min.
With a small storefront going in we will be bumping up the price a tiny bit, prolly $4/hr, but the parts supplies on hand will be much larger making alot of things easier.
I used them about a year ago when our desktop suddenly decided that booting up was for sissies, and we needed to try to recover the data from the hard drive. I think they charged 99 dollars.
And they didn’t retrieve everything. They wanted me to fill out a list of the locations to look for files - well, that makes sense, but really I needed to be able to look around myself in case I forgot some of the file paths. I had to leave the computer with them and they got to it in the next 24 hours - it would have been much better if I could have scheduled an appointment to come in and sit down with a tech, with the hard drive connected to a working computer, and say “gimme that, that, and that!”.
Fortunately, we were able to get the rest of our data off by DH taking the computer to work and hooking it up to a machine there.
So - for what I was able to tell them to do, they did fine, though pricey. But it didn’t quite meet our needs.
My experience seems to be in line – they can’t tell you what the problem is until they run the diagnostics…and the diagnostics are never cheap.
I love the concept – is there an alternative, other than phone tech support hell? Who does walk-in PC maintenance?
Which is a crock…I usually have a pretty damn good idea within 5-10 min of poking around. You do run into some sticky scenarios, I just had a machine with transient motherboard issues. Every few hours either the onboard network or the usb ports would just shut off seeemingly at random. 5-15 min later they would come back on. Kinda freky when a machine nobody is touching pops out the little USB connect and usb disconnect noise every so often.
From time to time, newspapers and TV station run a test of computer repair services by setting up some obvious and easily fixed error and asking techs to diagnose.
Geek Squad always misdiagnoses the problem and suggests an expensive alternative. They seem to be in the business of selling upgrades, not repairing computers.
CBC’s Marketplace did a show like that about a month ago. They gave the computer a faulty stick of memory and then called in the repair people.
At least one guy recommended a new computer (which would, of course, be purchased from his company), while another said that the computer was fucked and the only way to retrieve the data was to send the hard drive to some special vacuum-sealed room, at a cost of about $2000!
You can watch the video here.
I was doing tech support for a very popular tax software program not too long ago. One of our products (well, multiple ones, but that’s not important now) has a charge of 60 bucks an hour for phone support. Some CPA called for the product that was taking 60 bucks an hour…but it wasn’t him on the phone…it was a Geek Squad member, which charged him their hourly fee as well. He got reamed big time.
Holy shit, that is fucking brazen!
“I don’t know how to fix your problem, but i do know how to call tech support. And i’ll charge you for the privilege.”
Who did he get reamed by? You? The customer? His bosses?
The guy talking to us WAS the boss…the owner of the accounting firm. He called us up, confirmed his identity, handed the receiver to someone (who even identified himself as a “member of the Geek Squad”, which was supposedly met with stifled giggles because of the tone of his voice).
I think the Squad rate was something like 170 bucks an hour.
In the accountant’s defense (I’m trying, here) he was pressured and needed to get his thing fixed, cost be damned.
Rereading my original tale, I see that the use of me antecedents was…unsound.
I think he’s talking about the customer getting reamed.
Why would anyone need to call someone to change a power supply? A monkey with a Phillips screwdriver can do it. The plugs only go in one way. 