Annoying

Best Buy can’t seem to fix my computer. They’ve made it better. It’ll boot up and run for about 10-15 minutes before it chokes out, then the monitor goes dead. So far in my ownership I’ve gotten a new hard drive, power supply and mother board. But I haven’t been able to use my home computer for the last two weeks and I’m tired of it. So today at best buy we’re going to have a conversation about a loaner. My opening request will be “Please give me a comparable computer and I’ll give it back when mine is fixed. Please put my hard drive in the new computer.” My compromise will be to buy a computer from them (on store credit) and than return it when mine is fixed, or at the first payment. If they can’t fix it in that time we’ll talk about replacements. I need to take look at how the warranty is written. I’m pretty sure that they have the choice of whether to repair the machine of replace it outright.


Update

I took the PC back to Best Buy again today. Had the ‘geek squad’ manager take a look at it. He thought that the motherboard was sending bad information to the video card. I had asked him to try video cards he knew to be good, and monitors he knew to be good, and we found that nothing worked. So it’s going back in for service. Apparently this is the last time it can go in for service. If it needs to go in one more time they’ll just give me a new computer. Of course, this is only good until the service contract expires on February 9, 2007. I’d consider extending the service plan since I’ve had so much trouble with this computer, but it costs 100$. It doesn’t seem worth it. Especially since at this point I’ve got a new mother board, power supply, and hard drive. The only things left are Ram and the video card.

They don’t have a loaner program, but they offered to let me buy any computer in the store and I’d be able to return it when mine came back from service. I gave some thought to buying the best model they had, but I don’t really think I’d make much use of the extra capacity anyway so I just grabbed something comparable.

I will say this, the people at best buy have been polite, friendly, and professional. I’d be willing to trade all of that for some fat smelly misanthrope who called me a n00b and than fixed my machine that afternoon. But it could be worse.