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

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.'"

Comments

Read the article

[earnest murderer]

All they do is delete the shortcuts on the desktop and run windows update.

And they don't even do that reliably.

Re:I'll optimize your new PC for free.

[tpwch]

You can also try this tool which works even better.

Re:I'll optimize your new PC for free.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give you my Direct Hard Disk Optimization technique (patent pending):

1. Download an Ubuntu Live CD: http://www.ubuntu.com/
2. Boot from it and open a terminal
3. Run: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M
4. Enjoy optimization

Consumerist

[Knara]

While I have no doubt the conclusion is sound, it'd be nice if it came from somewhere else than the Consumerist. I've never seen a more rabid, one-sided, whiny user base outside of Free Republic.

Yes, I know they're owned by Consumer Reports. No, that doesn't make it reputable.