"Li'l Abner" wrote in message
news:Xns9DEB9C0E628B1butter@wefb973cbe498...
I don't know how many people I have had come to me that had already been to
Best Buy and their "geek squad". Although I am retired and not officially
in business, I do work on a few computers as a pastime.
Here are a couple of examples that really stand out to me.
A lady had a computer that wouldn't start up. The "geek squad" told her it
was the motherboard and were going to charge her 80 some dollars just to
send it to the factory for her; not counting what the factory would
charge.
In about five minutes of process elimination I took her modem out and it
booted right up. She didn't use dialup anyway so I put a slot cover in
place of it and sent her home happy for $10.
Just today another lady brought me one with Vista that wouldn't boot past
the Microsoft Windows logo at the bottom. They told her it was the hard
drive and that it would cost between 300 and 400 dollars to fix it. I took
the drive out and slaved it to one of my computers to see if I could
retrieve her data. Checkdisk wanted to run on it when I booted it so I let
it. Her stuff was there. I put the drive back in her computer and all was
well. Checkdisk (chkdsk) had fixed it.
I realize this post is inappropriate but I felt the need to vent.
The people are ripoff artists!

Most places hire people with very little knowledge, so "send it off" or
"replace ..." is about all they can do. Shame, but its the case in most
technical support operations, there are the odd people who really know what
they are doing but most don't have much of a clue and just follow a script.
I suspect smaller one-man-bands are probably better in the main.

FWIW: Re the lady who was told the problem was with the hard drive (you
probably did this anyway) but if you suspect the drive then its probably
best to copy any recoverable data off it first before running chkdsk. If the
drive is failing then running chkdsk could make it unrecoverable - but I
appreciate that this depends on the failure mode of the drive.
--
Brian Cryer
http://www.cryer.co.uk/brian