BEST BUY GEEK SQUAD Distroyed my computer Panama City Florida

I'm in the same business as Geek Squad--computer services for home, small office and business. I can tell you Geek Squad is ANYTHING but a "trained, professional" organization servicing this sector. Behind the black ties and cute VW Bugs is often just a college or high school novice who knows a few tricks. But that's the innocuous part--the people who really know what's going on are trained to SELL SELL SELL, even if what they are upselling doesn't give the consumer any value.

In one case, a client of mine went to GS for a memory upgrade that should have cost about $60, installed. By the time she left, they had upsold her bill to over $250 on a 4-year-old PC by convincing her that she needed things like the "PC cleaning service" for $40. For this price she watched as they took 90 seconds to run a vacuum cleaner hose around the inside of the system unit. Wow, thats $1,600 per hour! Good work if you can get it.

In the case of the submitter, it sounds like they should have educated him as to what could happen (loss of his software), encouraged him to locate software install disks for his PC and (once the extent of the infection became clear) not touched his PC if this crucial recovery media couldn't be located.

Also, once it became clear to GS that the infection was worse than at first thought, they should have immediately contacted the customer with the new diagnosis, explained to him the risks and cost of recovery and informed him it might actually be safer and more cost-effective to round up all recovery media and then rebuild the customer's OS image than to try to fight what was evidently a very bad spyware infection.

It appears, also, that the customer wasn't properly apprised of the difference between viruses and spyware, leaving him to think that they were ripping him off in disinfecting his PC when his previous three virus scans showed it clean. And, of course, there are always "zero-day threat" viruses that bypass AV software, the problem of keeping software definitions current, and on and on. (I have to say, one has to wonder if the customer really came up with a clean virus scan, what drove him to scan two more times? Virus scans are notoriously time-consuming.)

Sounds to me like GS, in their drive to get the client's cash, failed in their duty to 1) warn him of risks and not take on a job that was too risky, 2) educate him on what the threat was and the action required and then 3) keep him apprised and in the decision loop.

Typical Geek Squad, alas.