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Best Buy $39.95 "Optimization" At Best a Waste of Money

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hooray-for-corporate-scams dept.

DCFC writes "The Consumerist deconstructs the appalling 'optimization service' that Best Buy has been pushing on consumers in recent weeks. The retailer charges 40 bucks to give you a slower PC, and make bizarre claims that it makes it go 200% faster. 'We ran the 3DMark 2003 graphics benchmark on each laptop, comparing optimized and non-optimized settings. For two of our samples, the Gateway and Toshiba, performance changes were negligible. On the Asus laptop, however, optimized tests actually scored about 32% worse than the non-optimized setup. We have been unable to isolate the source of this performance change. On none of the three tested laptops did the optimized settings give a performance boost in our test.'"

9 of 504 comments (clear)

  1. Friends by Khris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Friends don't let friends take their computers to Best Buy!

    1. Re:Friends by twentynine · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Be fair. You can get a pretty decent deal sometimes. Just don't get any add-on services.

    2. Re:Friends by selven · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There's one word you could remove from that sentence and have it remain grammatically, orthographically and factually correct...

    3. Re:Friends by longhairedgnome · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Who buys movies?

      --
      GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
    4. Re:Friends by Awptimus+Prime · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So you go to Best Buy,

      and rip them off...

      That way we can make sure to encourage the retail chains in the US to remain as shitty as possible?

      I don't shop at Best Buy, but I disagree with the practice of wasting other people's time and money, which is what this is. It is much wiser to go to Microcenter and get a $10 SATA or IDE enclosure and just keep your old drive in it as a spare or to give to a friend who needs one. All my old 100-120GB drives from the turn of the millenium are happily housed in such units and come in handy when someone needs temp storage or truck around some data.

      Doing it this way, the retail establishment has no reason to jack up prices further, keeps employees employed, and Startech or whoever made the enclosure got a sale for a manufacturing a decent enough product.

      There is a thousand ways to royally screw over companies using warranty and return policies, they don't take much thought to discover and abuse, but I don't think doing so is the path to any form of enlightenment.

    5. Re:Friends by GIL_Dude · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I guess some big-wheel producers or their companies could be said to buy movies. The rest of us just license them for non-public presentation in our homes or some such nonsense (I fast forward that part when possible; it isn't always a no button press area even though it is a no skip section for some reason). Of course there are many folks these days who acquire their license through less than legal means. I personally have a wall of DVD's that are all legally licensed. But I'd agree with you that pretty much no normal person "buys movies" since the several million dollars for them are out of our price range.

      I guess if you said "who buys round plastic shiny discs that ship with a limited viewing license for a movie" I would hold up my hand and say "me".

  2. Re:Anonymouse Coward by yurtinus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Never attribute to malice what could be ascribed to incompetence.

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    +1 Disagree
  3. Best Buy salesmen by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Buying ANYTHING at Best Buy these days is a chore.

    "No I don't want your optimization plan."
    "No I don't want an extended warranty."
    "No I don't want any accessories."
    "No I don't want the super awesome $50 Monster Cables with gold tips."
    "No I don't want your PlatinumShield super-dupper service plan."

    What's bad is when you get a salesman who wants to argue with you. "But you need our service plan!!" Sometimes I just want to throttle these guys. If there was another place I could get computer parts and electronics locally (for times when waiting three or four days for Newegg isn't an option) I would never set foot inside their doors. A few weeks ago I had pushy BB salesmen try to sell me a warranty plan on a $20 card reader, for crying out loud.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  4. Re:System tuning... by IKnwThePiecesFt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So as a former Geek Squad agent I have to chime in. First, I do believe the service is overpriced. Second, I don't speak for the whole company, just my store.

    That being said, the "optimization" service that we sold consisted of 1) Applying any available Windows updates, including service packs in the case of sales immediately following the release of a new one. 2) Uninstall of any trialware that comes preloaded that is of no real value (I.E. most of the shit preloaded on Toshibas, HPs, etc)
    3) Tweaking of MSConfig to disable any excess run-at-startup items that are for legitimate software but that shouldn't run at startup (Nero, Roxio, Adobe Reader, etc)
    Finally the agent would ensure that automatic updates are enabled etc.

    While yeah, you may say that this service is overpriced (I would tend to agree) it's not as much bullshit as everyone is imagining.

    Again, as you might imagine with a corporation as large as Best Buy, consistency is not exactly 100% (My agent number was in the 18,000s, and that was assigned to me two years ago) so YMMV.