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In fact, I end up having to tell people to go there when they come in, since we no longer are accepting repairs.
You couldn't have sent them to a competent computer repair facility? Best Buy is the last place I would tell anybody to go for computer repairs.
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@mopar_man: Unless you were worried about having someone do better repairs than you. Then it's just smart business.
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What do you expect from corporate scumbags? I once contacted a company who was reported to be in negotiations with another company, telling them how against the move I was as a customer. The response outright denied the whole issue.
Guess what was in the news the next day?
I should have reported that asshole to the highups and how he lied to me. This was a decade ago, too, before all the recent corporate scandals. Nice to know companies can still lie through their teeth.
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The sad part of this is that Geek Squad's founder had a great idea and Best Buy turned it into sh*t for a quick buck.
And to the founder if he is reading this... I watched a video of you talking about your company at the early market development stages in one of my management classes, it seemed like a great company to work for and to do business with you also talked about how customer was the number one priority however this has changed. I hope you can turn this around because it is nice to know there are companies/businesses out there with a conscience.
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With the size of hard drives today it can take hours to scan a single hard drive.
wow, this guy obviously knows nothing at all about computers.
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I saw the last article and this one, think about it Geek Squad employs thousands of people across the US and Canada.
If Geek Squad were to cut 40% of their workforce, that's something you'd hear about on CNN or in the Wall Street Journal, that's the loss of at least 4,000 Geek Squad Employees.
Some fact checking needs to be done before this stuff makes it on the front page. I noticed Robert said \"I'd like to see a copy of the memo if you get it.\" Shouldn't you have the memo before putting up a story like that?
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@mac-phisto: For real my 500Gb drive takes about 6 min to run an spyware program and maybe 10 min to do a Antivirus scan.
@Nemesis_Enforcer: How much data do you have in your 500GB HD and what kind is it? What is your system build?
I would love to own one of those because not to sound like a dick but my 500GB SATA HD has about 200GB of data in it and with Kaspersky it takes about 45 mins to an hour to scan it.
4GB Ram, 3.33 Ghz Smithfield.
@mac-phisto & @Nemesis_Enforcer
What a great world if Viruses and Spyware were the only computer problems! Seriously, how much data is on your 500GB Drive? And have you ever scanned that drive with a diagnostic tool to make sure it's functioning properly? GS does more than just scan for Virus and Spyware as part of their diagnostic process. BTW, do your feet get wet when you are walking on water?
Hmmmm. Excuse me. Is the founder telling us that a Geeker would sit there for 6 hours looking at the screen waiting for a 160Gb hard drive scan to finish? Or even those in India doing the same? I think not. You kick it off and then turn around and serve the next customer.
It's called multitasking, I do it all day long. Ben I think you have been flimflammed.
@c41cifer: what's with the hostility? i scan multiple computers with multiple diagnostic tools & it has never taken me \"hours to scan a single drive\"...at least not since windows 2000 (i remember a defrag used to be an overnite venture on win95). it doesn't even take me hours to deep scan a 4-drive RAID array on a 6-yr old file server at work (it takes about 30 minutes). & i highly doubt people are bringing those into the gs.
granted, most ppl coming to geek squad probably have 3-4 year old computers & have never so much as run a disk cleanup, but this is a b.s. argument. \"we need to outsource & reduce pay to our in-house staff to increase profit margin at best buy.\" that would be the accurate version of what's going on here.
In the early 80s, a computer programmer/engineer and a computer operator were the same thing.
Boy, how the world has changed.
@c41cifer: Actually I have 3 500gb drives as backup and a 120gb 10,000rpm drive as my main drive. All of them are Sata drives. And I have about 300-400 gb on each drive except the 120gb one. I run Adaware,Spybot and A-squared for spyware everyday and I run my anti-virus every 3 days and I run a diagnostic program automatically upon every shut down. So I can say that it usually doesent take very long. I admit I keep my drives in good shape. So I wouldn't say thats across the board or it might not be the same across the board but YMMV. I have seen diagnostics and spyware programs take hours only on computers that are royally fucked where ppl just surf everywhere and click on a lot of popups and install BS programs. But after running several programs they run a lot faster.
@moorie679: I am running a Athlon 64 X2 6000 overclocked to 3.4ghz with 4gb of ram and dual Geforce 8800 GTX video cards SLI. So I know I got a screaming system and others will have different times. i was just reffering to his exageration of how long it takes to do simple scans..
@mac-phisto - Having participated in the process... I can say with absolute certainty that some of the scans that AJU runs take between one and three hours to run. Ewido used to run upwards of three hours on nastified computers with full hard drives, some of the virus scans run on full bore can take that much or more. On the remote connection you just kick off one or two scanners and flip to the next computer in the queue, then check on it later.
What you have to realize is these aren't tuned geek machines, they're five year old dell laptops with 256 MB of RAM running XP. Trying to defrag a 95% full, 30% fragmented drive with no space for a swap file and 256 megs of RAM takes forever.
The labor's part of the equation, obviously paying a contracted company for overseas labor should be cheaper (if it isn't, someone at Best Buy should be fired), but the other major gain is in productivity. When you don't have to deal with customers every five minutes you can bust out a whole lot more repairs - AJU techs can bust out easily twice to three times the machines that a store tech can. Plus you gain the ability to move your labor pool around, so if one store has no computers, you can have your remote techs work on those at a different store.
Well I could see the wait times rising due to increased work-load. Now that CompUSA is closing 1/2 their stores, the only real brick and morter store people know to go to for repairs are Best Buy. In fact, I end up having to tell people to go there when they come in, since we no longer are accepting repairs.