Friday, February 20, 2009

Hooray for the Geek Squad!

It happens to many of us:  Our computer fails in a way that we can't fix it ourselves.  

Mine wouldn't boot at all.  I called Dell, ran through diagnostics, and they said they couldn't repair it and that it wasn't covered by their warranty (which otherwise covers me until 2011), so I should call Geek Squad.  (Hmph - so much for Dell's warranty.)

Fortunately there' s a Geek Squad as part of the Best Buy store just a few blocks away from me.  I took my pc in.  

1.5 weeks later I have it back, the operating system reinstalled, and all my data (nearly 500 GB) rescued and successfully backed up on an external 1 T drive.  It's gonna be a pain to reinstall all the programs, but at least all my work is there.

What was the problem?  I occasionally leave my computer on all night to enable processing of files and to help clean up and to automatically download updates.  Microsoft pushed down an update, but it was incompatible with a sound driver (I use high quality sound software from M Audio).  That incompatibility led to corruption of one of the Vista startup files.  

Definitely another bad mark for Microsoft.  From now on, I do all my updates manually.

Kudos to Geek Squad!  Thank you very much!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I was looking for some blogs about Geek Squad experiences, and I happened upon this story. I feel so badly that you're stuck having to re-install all of your software, because it probably didn't have to happen. I haven't used Vista, but it seems that Geek Squad gave you such a crude remedy for the issue. A real Geek should have been able to fix it in minimal time without resorting to such drastic measures.

I just wrote a report about a transaction with Geek Squad in which they offered similar measures. Fortunately, I intervened in that situation, found a remedy for the problem and saved the integrity of the entire file system.

Good luck with your computer.