The results were varied and shocking:
Best Buy: Said needed a new power supply
Circuit City: $59.99 “The jumper was set wrong”
COMPUsa: Charged $119.99, their minimum charge, but correctly diagnosed and fixed the problem
Fry’s: $69.99, fixed all good
Torrence Computer Repair (local): Fixed, at no charge b/c it was so easy
BM (local)I: $275 due to “power short,” as the “main board” and “hard drive” were “bad”
Shady computer repairmen are the new shady mechanics, the creative can find plenty of profit in unexpected places.
If your computer starts smoking, you might be better off getting a referral from friends for a local tech known for honest dealings. — BEN POPKEN
HowTo Give Computer Techs a Bad Name [Daily Cup of Tech]
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@erock0:
Well, yes. If the footage is edited or dubbed to make it appear that the techs are saying something they’re not, then you’ve got a point. Also if it turns out that we are all just brains in vats somewhere.
But assuming some base reality, at least two of those guys outright lied.
@ARPRINCE:
When the SAME in-laws call week after week after week with the SAME questions and the SAME spyware re-installed on their PC after being told NOT to install it I give up. My (limited) free time is too important to spend it fixing their PC (again) for free. Especially when it involves an hour or more of travel time and then the time to fix the problem.
I drive out to my customers. If they have a problem I can fix in under 15 minutes, I just charge them $5 or so for the gas and trouble of going out to their houses to fix such a small problem. It may be selfish, but small jobs add up after a while after all that driving.
@EtherealStrife: I do brain-dead repairs for nearly free because I feel it’s unethical to charge a lot for a simple task that takes almost no effort and takes less than 5 minutes to solve. Not every business will do anything for profit.
HA
Well, thats corporate america for ya…
Lets see, you disconnect a power connecter on your computer and can’t figure out why the computer isn’t working, someone quotes you X dollars to fix it, you find the best price and go for it.
I don’t see the problem here, given the prices quoted above. I guess everyone isn’t exactly on the same page, go with the best deal and if the computer is fixed, great! Hopefully most consumers are smart enough to shop around for the best prices, and hopefully
the Geek Squad HQ in Santa Clara is setup like this, you walk in with a broken computer, $199 (they rarely look at it), in 2-3 days they call you to say it’s fixed.
Hopefully they correctly diagnose and tell you the problem at the end, but the reason you take a computer to someone to have it fixed is because you can’t do it yourself. If you don’t want to pay what they quote you then take it to someone else. Time is “money”. I don’t think most computer techs are there to help you for free, most have paying customers to deal with. It was nice that that one company was willing to give you a freebie, but I guarantee that they are praying you’ll tell your friends and come back and buy something else from them, but you WON’T because you’re doing a sting operation, and have no intention of any return business. (luckily this article is some good free advertising for them)
So why do you think businesses are trying to get so much money out of you the first time you come into their store? There are pessimistic and optimistic answers to this question. I could elaborate, but I don’t feel like it.
If you watch the video, you can see that there are additional problems with the dell. When I took computer repair in high school we worked on similar machines, and often had to throw them out due to failure of various parts. When I worked for compusa we checked for disconnected or tampered with connections (we saw a lot of fraud). I didn’t charge for a disconnected hard drive, as it was usually a parent who had grounded their computer savy child from games.
Thank God I live near Torrance. I now know where to go.
I find it interesting that the places that correctly diagnosed the problem (compusa, local) both indicated that the IDE cable was “loose” rather than disconnected. As a self-professed geek and computer hardware reviewer (have been reviewing hardware for about 2 years on another site) I can attest to the fact that there certainly is a difference between a loose cable and a disconnected one. a disconnected cable is easy to see and troubleshoot, a “loose” cable is another matter entirely. Especially IDE cables, which can be somewhat finicky to begin with. The poor guy in that repair shop who the news investigator went all Dateline: to catch a predator on probably booted the computer up and saw that the hard drive wasn’t working. Since IDE cables don’t just come out on their own, he said it was probably the hard drive or the motherboard. All this is not to mention the fact that those computers looked like they were built about 10 years ago.
Here’s a chat between me and a Geek Squad agent:
GS agent: This is agent ________. How may I help you?
me: My computer keeps randomly rebooting
me: It looks like a heat problem
GS agent: You’ll need to bring it in to get it serviced.
me: That’s what I was told the last 120459135891308 times it happened, and you clearly weren’t able to resolve the problem.
GS agent: Thank you for contacting geek squad.
(I disconnect)
I didn’t spend 3 minutes waiting for some macro to tell me to bring my computer in to get it serviced. I clean out all the dirt stuck in the box and voila, it works. Gee, would it kill to give real advice?
heh this is one old video some dragged out from so long ago.
Well, the issues with quotes, is they will not be able to quote you with out running their “diagnostics” which has its own fee. You can’t bounce from place to place getting quotes since you don’t get them to start with.
Even though this is an old video, my comments are simply in the manner of how it was done. With outright lies and misdiagnoses, most of their companies show just how poor their service really is.