Best Buy "Service"

I think she's got a legitimate claim.

Not a $54 MILLION claim, but a legitimate one...
 
Best Buy generally contracts repairs like that with either the manufacturer or third party vendor. I've seen the third party vendors not only lose laptops but completely destroy them and ship them to the customer. The lowest bidder I'm sure...
 
And she’d also lost thousands dollars worth of music and thousands of irreplaceable photos.
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Back up yer effin' hard drive, lady!
 
Its the deception (if true) on the part of BB that leads me to favor her claim more than anything else.
 
Greebo said:
I think she's got a legitimate claim.

Not a $54 MILLION claim, but a legitimate one...
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Yeah, but then, she doesn't expect $54 million either. She wants to hold their feet to the fire for their incompetence, and she wants it to make some headlines. I say "Good on her". Similar issues have steered me away from all the chain electronics stores. I'd rather either deal with a local small merchant, or someone on e-Bay.
 
jesse said:
Best Buy generally contracts repairs like that with either the manufacturer or third party vendor. I've seen the third party vendors not only lose laptops but completely destroy them and ship them to the customer. The lowest bidder I'm sure...
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No, you missed it, the computer was never shipped out of the store for repair.
 
Henning said:
No, you missed it, the computer was never shipped out of the store for repair.
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or it's at the repair depot waiting a part, or... Which of their multitude of stories do you choose to believe! Obviously some of the store personnel are lying, but I have no idea which ones.
 
Henning said:
No, you missed it, the computer was never shipped out of the store for repair.
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I've seen that happen as well. The cheap service tag ticket falls off. The laptop gets in the wrong spot. Someone decides it's the stores property and sells it open box. I saw this event unfold at least every couple months.
 
jesse said:
I've seen that happen as well. The cheap service tag ticket falls off. The laptop gets in the wrong spot. Someone decides it's the stores property and sells it open box. I saw this event unfold at least every couple months.
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I've got AOPA and D.A.N. stickers all over my laptop, so should it ever be in for service there's no CHANCE it'll be mistaken for open box! :)
 
I hope she gets a large chunk of money. And now that Best Buy in Albuquerque has become one giant Apple store, I'll be happy to see all $54 Million paid to her.

And she's kind of attractive...I'd hit it.
 
jesse said:
I've seen that happen as well. The cheap service tag ticket falls off. The laptop gets in the wrong spot. Someone decides it's the stores property and sells it open box. I saw this event unfold at least every couple months.
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Meaning that not only did all of Geek Squad have access to her ID data, some random bargain hunter got it.
 
Wonder how much of her "thousands [of] dollars worth of music" was legitimately obtained and how much was pirated. In any event, when you send your computer in to one of those stores, you sign a form saying you know that you should back up all your data as it could be lost or corrupted during repairs and that you will not hold them responsible for its loss during repair.
 
Ron Levy said:
Wonder how much of her "thousands [of] dollars worth of music" was legitimately obtained and how much was pirated. In any event, when you send your computer in to one of those stores, you sign a form saying you know that you should back up all your data as it could be lost or corrupted during repairs and that you will not hold them responsible for its loss during repair.
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Yeah but I doubt that a judge will hold that up when the loss is as a result of out and out negligence.

I mean, tenants can sign a lease saying the landlord can shut off the water if they don't pay rent, but the lease doesn't make it legal.
 
Ron Levy said:
In any event, when you send your computer in to one of those stores, you sign a form saying you know that you should back up all your data as it could be lost or corrupted during repairs and that you will not hold them responsible for its loss during repair.
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She said the power-switch failed, maybe she couldn't even turn it on to backup anything. Don't know if that makes any difference on the waiver or not.
 
Greebo said:
Yeah but I doubt that a judge will hold that up when the loss is as a result of out and out negligence.

I mean, tenants can sign a lease saying the landlord can shut off the water if they don't pay rent, but the lease doesn't make it legal.
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correct. for example, signing a medical informed-consent form does not protect the doctor if your complication is a result of medical negligence.
 
Matthew said:
She said the power-switch failed, maybe she couldn't even turn it on to backup anything. Don't know if that makes any difference on the waiver or not.
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No. It doesn't. The paper gets signed either way. Backing up the data before sending it to service is a money maker for Best Buy. It was $189 on a laptop. It was not covered by warranty.

If you didn't back it up you were flipping a coin. Most of the time you would lose the data.
 
jesse said:
No. It doesn't. The paper gets signed either way. Backing up the data before sending it to service is a money maker for Best Buy. It was $189 on a laptop. It was not covered by warranty.

If you didn't back it up you were flipping a coin. Most of the time you would lose the data.
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Could you remove the hard drive before turning it in for service? In the situation in question, where the power switch was apparently bad, the HD wouldn't have been required to diagnose or fix the problem.
 
gprellwitz said:
Could you remove the hard drive before turning it in for service? In the situation in question, where the power switch was apparently bad, the HD wouldn't have been required to diagnose or fix the problem.
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Nope. It caused huge problems because certain vendors would send it back stating the problem was do to a missing hard drive with a bill for their time. I saw that happen several times.

It was often that you would never see the laptop again. Instead you would get a phone call saying "come pick up a new one. yours isn't worth fixing". If you demanded the laptop back--we could get it--but you wouldn't get it back fixed and you wouldn't get a new one.

There is a lot of red tape in that company. Not a good place to work, shop, buy, or invest (IMO).
 
jesse said:
No. It doesn't. The paper gets signed either way. Backing up the data before sending it to service is a money maker for Best Buy. It was $189 on a laptop. It was not covered by warranty.

If you didn't back it up you were flipping a coin. Most of the time you would lose the data.
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I think part of her complaint isn't that the data was lost because it wasn't backed up, her complaint is that they lost the whole system that had personal data on it.

Either way - lessons learned. Don't give away sensitive data, and keep backups.
 
Matthew said:
I think part of her complaint isn't that the data was lost because it wasn't backed up, her complaint is that they lost the whole system that had personal data on it.

Either way - lessons learned. Don't give away sensitive data, and keep backups.
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Well, it looks as if the lesson is don't try to get your laptop repaired, at least at BB (and I doubt they're unique), because they have your sensitive data as soon as you give them the laptop! Or, buy laptops with the tiniest HD available, replace it with one that you'll actually use for your work, and swap them back if it ever needs service, so they have the pristine HD rather than the one with your data. Doesn't work so well, though, if the problem is due to software!:no:
 
gprellwitz said:
Well, it looks as if the lesson is don't try to get your laptop repaired, at least at BB (and I doubt they're unique), because they have your sensitive data as soon as you give them the laptop! Or, buy laptops with the tiniest HD available, replace it with one that you'll actually use for your work, and swap them back if it ever needs service, so they have the pristine HD rather than the one with your data. Doesn't work so well, though, if the problem is due to software!:no:
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Or keep everything you don't want anyone else to see on an external drive. There don't seem to be too many more neighborhood shops around here anymore. CC and BB kind of dried them up. So, unless you are handy with a screwdriver and not scared of breaking anything else, you kind of have to trust somebody else.
 
Matthew said:
Or keep everything you don't want anyone else to see on an external drive.
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Easier said than done, since temporary files, caches, etc. will likely be written to the OS drive. It could be changed, but would be troublesome. You also don't want to use a removable drive for things like the OS temporary directories, because I think that then the laptop won't really work without the removable drive being present.
Matthew said:
There don't seem to be too many more neighborhood shops around here anymore. CC and BB kind of dried them up. So, unless you are handy with a screwdriver and not scared of breaking anything else, you kind of have to trust somebody else.
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Swapping out a hard drive is trivial. literally all you need to do is be able to use a screwdriver in most cases. The hard part would be obtaining and installing the OS with all the laptop drivers. Best way would be to create a recovery DVD from the original drive, swap drives, then use the recovery DVD to load the replacement drive.
 
gprellwitz said:
Swapping out a hard drive is trivial. literally all you need to do is be able to use a screwdriver in most cases. The hard part would be obtaining and installing the OS with all the laptop drivers. Best way would be to create a recovery DVD from the original drive, swap drives, then use the recovery DVD to load the replacement drive.
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Good idea and trivial for you and me, but Aunt Minnie has to call her nephew or go back to CC and BB. I think there are a lot of Aunt Minnies out there.

A backup method that requires purchase of another HD is a lot more trouble than most regular folks are going to take. Most people don't save anything. Maybe they do once, when they get adventurous, then don't do it again.

There's still the problem, though, of sensitive info being on the internal hd. Quicken, TurboTax, and other financial s/w have various methods of pw protection. But still, if you turn in the PC for repairs, you're giving that away.
 
Ron Levy said:
TANSTAAFL. Back up all your data and encrypt your sensitive data, or fix it yourself.
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Encryption is a good idea that hasn't been mentioned before in this thread. But just how easy is that for "Aunt Minnie", and how do we make sure that temp files and cache aren't just sitting there for anyone to see? I really haven't looked at this area in quite a while.
 
gprellwitz said:
Encryption is a good idea that hasn't been mentioned before in this thread. But just how easy is that for "Aunt Minnie", and how do we make sure that temp files and cache aren't just sitting there for anyone to see? I really haven't looked at this area in quite a while.
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That's the flaw with most encryption, especially on Windows, the data has to be unencrypted in RAM in order for you to work with it, and RAM is paged to the swap file without your say-so.

This looks interesting. http://www.truecrypt.org/

With any encryption scheme, I'd be careful to have (encrypted) backups in case it all went sour.
 
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mikea said:
That the flaw with most encryption, especially on Windows, the data has to be unencrypted in RAM in order for you to work with it, and RAM is paged to the swap file without your say-so.

This looks interesting. http://www.truecrypt.org/

With any encryption scheme, I'd be careful to have (encrypted) backups in case it all went sour.
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I use TrueCrypt, and it works great. I keep all my sensitive files in a TrueCrypt encrypted volume located primarily on my RAID-5 NAS, with the file itself replicated via DFS to my secondary workstation and my other server; that way I always have at least 3 copies of it, one of which lives on a fault-tolerant disk array. The only thing that'd sink me is if my apartment burned down, and I'm looking into some way to replicate it off site as well.

Normal backups? With that setup, who needs stinking backups? :D

(Sweet fancy Moses am I ever a huge dork. :redface: )
 
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