Whispers from the Wild

I received a call today from a rather worried lady who had a laptop where the hard drive was reporting imminent failure.  She’d approached Best Buy about a repair, and they had quoted her over $300.

This didn’t seem at all right to me.  New hard drives of the size hers was (she had a 160Gb) for laptops come in at around $60.  Over $240 for an engineering fee seemed absolutely outrageous.  So I asked a few more pertinent questions, and the con was revealed.

When she bought the laptop, just over 16 months ago, it came with Windows Vista on it.  Best Buy’s “solution” was to basically take the failing hard drive out and bin it, replacing it with a new hard drive that would then lack an operating system.  They had no intention of making any attempt whatsoever to migrate the data on the failing hard drive, so the extra money it turned out was for a brand new license of Windows 7.

So, they wanted over $300 for losing ALL the customers data and providing the customer with an operating system she didn’t want and she didn’t need.

This, to me, sums up what’s wrong with todays “computer repair” companies.  They operate on a “get it in, perform the most convenient to the company fix, get it out, get paid” basis.  They don’t care about the customer, all they want is the fee.

Now admittedly, it took Norton Ghost over five an a half hours to read the data off the failing hard drive, and another hour and a half to write it to the new drive – but that was mainly unsupervised work; leaving the computer that was reading the data alone to get the job done and only needing to do anything whenever an alert came up.  But the point is, after that 7 hours the customer had a new hard drive which she’d paid for, and a reasonable engineering fee – and that’s all.  She still had Vista, she still had all her documents and data, and essentially the computer is completely unchanged appearance and function-wise, other than having a larger amount of free space owing to her buying a 320Gb hard drive (which she decided to do since the price difference between 160Gb and 320Gb was only $10).

There’s no excuse for pushing customers into such expensive and unnecessary repairs in their hour of need – none whatsoever.  It’s like taking a car in for a puncture repair and selling someone a new axle.  It’s dishonest trading, and there’s no reason why anyone should have to put up with it.  Bad show, Best Buy, bad show!

Here’s a question for you.

Have you at any time over the past few years, gone out and bought a nice shiny flat screen?

If the answer is yes, Microsoft have something to say to you – in a year, it’s going to be obsolete.

Of course, if you have an old CRT screen that’s going to be obsolete too, but many people consider them already obsolete, so that’s not news.  But the thing is, the brand new Windows 7 features tactile screen input, so that your kids can get your new flat screen utterly filthy with grubby paws, resizing windows by touch and moving stuff around the screen by touch without using a mouse.  And much like Aero in Windows Vista, if your machine hasn’t got the specs, you miss out on the better aspects of the new interface.

Really they’ve made Windows do all it’s possible for a GUI to do on a standalone machine, and until the consumers doubts about privacy issues related to storing their data on someone elses server are settled, “cloud” computing isn’t really going to take off.  Windows 7 is really somewhat redundant already, just as Windows Vista added very little functionality over what Windows XP was capable of.  Sure, Vista made some things easier, but there’s very little it can actually do that you can’t make XP do in some form.  Quite what the selling point to Windows 7 will be this early after the fiasco of trying to push DRM-filled Vista on an unwelcoming public remains to be seen.