Last night we went to buy my mom a laptop for her Christmas present. She just needed something cheap to surf the internet and check her email and watch DVDs on, and Best Buy had a $300 Toshiba laptop that fit that bill perfectly.
While my toddler and I were promenading around the store (she decided she’d rather explore than stand right around one section), the Best Buy Geek Squadder was giving her a hard sell on having them set up the laptop for her for $99. When she finally found me, I said oh no, we don’t need that, I can do that. Since I was also trying to hold on to the Little One, I didn’t quite catch what they actually did, but it seemed to include installing updates, checking to see everything worked, getting rid of junk apps, and in general configuring the computer. The guy figured out a good selling technique to use with me – he acknowledged I could totally do it, but pointed out that spending hours clicking OK at a bunch of dialog boxes maybe wasn’t the best use of my time. Which was a compelling argument, and I admit I was a little tempted, but ultimately declined.
He said that all the computers they had were already pre-Geek-Squad configured, so he’d have to remove the configuring before selling it to us. I said okay, sounds inefficient, but sure. I then went on another round of toddler-promenading, so I didn’t see what happened next; my mom says that he went out back to the warehouse supply and got one, but she says he did not do anything to the box.
So once everyone went to bed I opened it up, plugged it in, and turned it on. It… basically worked straight out of the box. It came with two junk apps she’ll never use that I cleaned up (there are probably more running in the background, and I didn’t clean that, so that will take longer). It didn’t take hours. I think it took me all of 15 minutes to get it to a point where she could use it to do basically all the tasks she wanted.
So is that all they do, or did I get a “pre-configured” one by mistake? It was so easy (I haven’t bought a new computer in many years now; my work computer is configured by IT) I am actually wondering if we got a pre-configured one, but then I thought that Toshiba/Windows probably wants it to be easy to use straight out of the box, too (I must say my estimation of Toshiba and Windows 7 went up after this).
Another thing that makes me think it may already have been pre-configured is that it came out of the box with Chrome, which I can’t imagine is normal for Windows machines…? Or is Toshiba a Google fan?
(I’d still recommend my mom get the Geek Squad for setup if neither my sister nor I (or our husbands) were around, because the slightest things will stymie her – I’m not dissing on them as they perform a valuable service – but I just want to know if he was exaggerating about the “hours” or what.)