My son’s laptop started shutting off for no reason last week. For a guy who spends as much time online as he does, that’s a tragedy. And a tragedy for me, too – because I could just see how repairing the laptop could cost more than the laptop was worth, and nothing bugs me as much as throwing away good stuff just because it costs too much to fix.
Well, random shutdowns sounded to me like overheating – except that it booted up fine with a Linux Live CD. I opened it up – but not all the way, unfortunately – and everything seemed to be in order with the memory, hard drive and stuff. I ran Memtest86+, the memory tester for x86 architectures, and everything checked out. But when we tried to get into Windows – phwap, black screen of nothingness.
My son brought his laptop to CompUSA, and there the people did not listen to our tests and what-not – they said it would cost them $80 to try and reinstall Windows, and $120 to investigate any problem that might show up, and then they’d be able to see how much it would cost to fix.
My son picked up his computer and walked out of the place. He told me they didn’t listen to anything he said.
This weekend, we took it down to the local Best Buy – I’d be hearing bad things about their Geek Squad, but what the heck. The took the laptop, put it on a test rig, called us up about two hours later and said it was in fact an overheating problem, they cleaned it out and it seemed to be working fine, we should pick it up. Two hours – on a Sunday – $59.
We also bought Hot Shots Tennis for the PS2 (Wii Sports Tennis is okay, but there’s not much there aside from being a cool party game), Shadows of the Colossus PS2 for my son, and Final Fantasy III DS for me. An extra hundred bucks of software because Best Buy’s Geek Squad LISTENED to us, FIXED the problem FAST and DIDN’T OVERCHARGE.
That’s how you make your customers happy.
Stores differ. The ones we went to were both in Manchester, CT.