Reader Kevin forwarded us this story from Dave, a I.T. consultant friend of his who helps people with their computer problems in exchange for hardware donations to the school he works at. Dave’s “propane guy” said he recently took a desktop computer to Geek Squad after it failed, and “great Geek Squad guys were AWESOME and had been able to retrieve all of his family pictures for him,” before selling him a new laptop. Dave offered to take a look at the desktop and try to retrieve the rest of the important files– the “7 years of QuickBooks 2005 data” that Best Buy wasn’t able to save, but when Dave opened up the computer he says he was surprised to see that someone had cut some important cables.
I get the computer to my office and this is what I find:
1) Geek Squad cut the wires from the power supply to the motherboard plug so the power supply is worthless.
2) and a stick of RAM has been stolen from the second blue slot.
3) Geek Squad cut all of the IDE cables!
4) The Crown Jewel – Geek Squad broke the power connector off of
the Hard Drive controller.Maybe it was innocently, maybe it was maliciously, maybe to hide the fact that they hosed the drive. I’m going with malicious until I can solder on a connector and get these peoples data back…
I’m so hacked at Geek Squad I can’t even express it right now.
Obviously, this story isn’t coming from the computer’s owner, but we’ll pass along some advice anyway. We don’t see any reason why the owners of this computer shouldn’t consider filing a small claims lawsuit against Best Buy for the damages. Here’s some information about what small claims court is, and how it works. In addition, the owners should file a report with their attorney general and/or department of consumer affairs. We wouldn’t hesitate to contact the local police and let them know that someone may have vandalized the computer.
Geek Squad [Kevitivity]
(Photo: Dave Baker )
Wow, there’s alot of people commenting to this article that need a wee bit of education themselves. DDR has NEVER needed to be installed in pairs, neither DDR2. Now the board in the pictures is one of the old DDR1/PC133 boards that came out when Intel had the 845 chipset series. These boards weren’t too uncommon because for a while PC133 was pretty cheap and DDR was astronomically high.
Newer boards have slots colored to label the two different channels. You can still have 1 module in if you so desire, however you can get more performance (like 15% or so) if you cut the one stick in half and install two modules in dual channel.
Now they are rare (I’ve only ever seen one and I own it) but I think there’s been a couple boards out in the wild that had 2 sockets for DDR1 and 2 sockets for DDR2.
@MrEvil:
Yeah, I know right. By the way, those DDR1 and DDR2 ones were far and in between. Though now they have ones out that are DDR2 and DDR3 capable.
Chances are the client told the Geek Squad to recycle the computer since they had purchased and new one and transferred the data. Any tech knows that if you’re sending out something for recycling after a diagnostic, you clip the cables to the components that aren’t functional so that the company doing the recycling will know to melt it down rather than attempting refurb.
GG OP, way to make further some BS hype.