I'd say you're doing it wrong then. Though it does depend on your workflow. Where I work, we have a base windows setup. This is XPSP2 plus patches up to a month or two ago. We have a volume license. We sysprep our basic setup, and use driver genius to create autoinstallers for drivers for each machine type (sure, we could put them in OEM drivers, but we've found that if somehow you mess up any driver, the sysprep restore fails).
Our deployment of a base machine consists of: 1. Taking it out of the box (3 minutes or so) 2. Plugging it into the network and kvm switch (1 minute) 3. Turning it on, putting in a ghost network boot cd, letting it boot (2 Minutes) 4. Starting a ghostcast session to restore the base image (8 Minutes) 5. While that's going, grabbing the driver pack for the hardware onto a flash drive (part of the above 8 minutes) 6. When asked by windows, putting in PC name. (10 seconds) 7. Waiting for windows to start (3 minutes) 8. Logging on, running driver pack, join to domain (2 Minutes). 9. Deploy and test.
That's under 20 minutes, and that's not touch time - for instance a good 6 minutes or more is just waiting, so you can be doing other stuff.
Of course, if you have every desktop different, then you'll have to spend time configuring the different ones.
I wonder from a lending POV, how much is causation and how much is correlation? Looking at your follow up post down the thread (or up from here?) and based on imperfect news reports and such, due to all sorts of factors including *others* racism, minorities may not objectively be as safe a borrower.
I.E. I really don't care about someone's "race". But if I was looking at lending money, I'd be just as unlikely to lend to a minimum wage innercity single black mom as I would be to a white trailer trash single mom. Now if there are more of the former than the latter, the statistics would show higher interest rates on average for the former catagory.
But it doesn't mean the banks are racist, just that the average financial situation for a black mom is worse than for a white mom. Hence higher interest rates to guard against defaults.
This isn't to say that there isn't a lot of racism or unfairness causing bad financial situations for the average black mom vs white mom, but that expecting a company to be reverse racist (or stupid - give better interest rates to one group than equivelent members of other groups because of their race) is naive.
I don't like the idea of monthly fees - that's just me, however that said, I'd pay this fee and setup well before I'd pay for XM or Sirius...
And if someone offered something like this for TV shows and movies with a lead time similar to what I can get with newsgroups, at a similar price ($15-$20 a month), I'd pay to be legal. I care far less about owning stuff that I'll only watch once, and I'm ok with watching a TV show the day after it aired w/out commercials.
I'd like to get movies for an add on price - I'd pay up to $3 a movie, if it was released say a week or two after the theater release. Once I bought the movie, I'd need to be able to watch it for at least a week though, I'd prefer if it was available for as long as I kept up my subscription to the preferrably integrated service.
I have to say that I find any modern Linux install to be entirely painless. It's supported everything at least as well as windows, and I don't choose parts to be linux compatible.
What I have had problems with is installing new programs. I think I've tracked that down to my Windows installation expectations, that is download an installer, and run it, or a zip file and extract it. Linux doesn't seem to work that way - the only program I've successfully installed outside of the OS install is Opera, as I was able to just run the rpm.
I have a hard time liking the idea that I'm relying on the OS vendor to provide a mirror and installer/whatever for every piece of software I want to use, and if they don't, there's where it gets harder than Windows IMHO. Cause I can't YaST or Apt-Get or whatever, I have to run a make script etc, and I've yet to get that to work, though I haven't spent more than a day trying yet either.
Yea, I work at the geek squad, and I tried wearing a normal tie, and got told that I was out of uniform. Hell, I got told my pants were out of uniform because they had pleats. And let me tell you, there seems to be only one company that makes short sleeved white dress shirts with a pocket and no collar buttons, luckily they are sold at Burlington coat factory for $10.
What's worse is some cars have done this. For instance, I could never have changed the fricken BATTERY in my Olds 93 Cutlass supreme.
Some genious thought it would be cool to put it under a retaining bar, the WIPER FLUID container and CRUISE CONTROL box thingy (My mechanic knows the real term, I don't remember). It took my mechanic a straight hour to swap batteries.
This isn't me being ignorant (well, I guess I am) - the battery is a consumable - it ought to be like changing the oil! Why it's half buried in the engine compartment I'll never know.
Isn't there some quickfind in bookmarks? About the only thing I'd love to see is some search shortcut, maybe b, that you could use in the address bar to quickfind bookmarks.
What really amazes me is that Opera tends to release as many previews and betas as MS does for Windows releases, yet they still spend the first 4 point releases or so trying to get it stable again.
I'm hoping the weeklies might help have 9.0 actually be stable, but I'll not be suprised if Opera 9.0-9.03 or so are hopelessly buggy.
I have a problem with the argument "Won't anyone think of the Childeren". I on principle refuse to support anything that has that as an arguement.
The worse thing is that we are throwing away privacy rights for millions because hundereds are abused. And we're doing it to stop things that are already highly illegial. If people are already breaking the law, who thinks another law will help.
Or put another way, if a company is committing the horrible crime of distributing and profiting from child porn, in what world do you actually think they'd follow this law to keep logs?
A better question then is why it's not ok to let localities legislate pot the same as beer - some can be "dry" others can have this limit or that limit, still others could have none...
I think the biggest thing is that MS is fighting a battle unlike anything they have fought before with IE7. That is, their competitors (on windows) aren't like Netscape or Lotus.
Firefox doesn't really have a company MS can put out of business or buy up, there is not monentary pressure they can put directly against it to kill it. At worst, it will float around berefit of the Mozilla Corp, but someone will still likely be working on it, be it IBM, Redhat, SuSe, or j random hacker.
Opera isn't primarily tied to Windows, they make much of their money on embedded stuff - licensing in Adobe GoLive, set top boxes, and of course their stronghold, the mobile phone market - where MS is still having difficulty penetrating, and where IE whatever is far from a favorite.
And there is lots of wanna-be tech market buzz, not to mention decidely non tech buzz on alternative browsers. NYT ads for FireFox, CERT warning not to use IE, and all the continuous press in magazines and sites about Safari, Firefox, and Opera every time there is a point release it seems.
I'm not going to say MS is going to become a has been in the browser market. But I'm meeting more and more non-techies who use alternative browsers. And more people will hear about them due to the word of mouth.
I'm sorry you think so. The OEM CDs we do have access to are hardware restricted to the model they came with, they either won't run, or require phone calls to MS to activate. Then MS tells us we can only use that install of windows on ONE machine, regardless of the number of license keys we have on the side of computers. Maybe MS activation reps are wrong, but I'm not in a position to argue with them.
Don't know how long you've been working there, but from the post, you have *no* business calling yourself a geek! Working on customer machines when you don't know what the hell is going on in your own shop??
As a part time employee at the retail level, I am not privy to coporate legal affairs, their contracts, or the specifics of said contracts.
I also have no specific idea how customers are ending up with machines without restore CDs. I can, however, list what I believe to be the likely senarios - far more likely than the idea that every other member of the Geek Squad just waits for me to leave, and then goes madly removing CDs from sealed boxes...
I've never been allowed to take out a machine just for testing at Best Buy to see what might happen over a week or so to see if a reminder pop's up. No one has mentioned any issues, and the last OEM PC I bought was 2 years ago, and came with restore CDs.
I don't know where you work, but I get paid to follow procedure and create revenue for Best Buy. Not to question every procedure, or try and get manuals on corporate policys and intercompany contracts.
Thanks. That's actually helpful, and I'll pass that along so our customers are advised as such. This is beneficial in 2 ways - it actually gives me a (weak) way to sell a service we never get to sell - that of making sure the customer has restore discs, and if the customer doesn't want that, they are aware there is something they *need* to do ASAP.
This is just plain dumb. The media is secondary (even in cases where other software exists on the media). What is primary is a legit license key. Use most any freakin media you want to, MS won't care as long as your key is unique, valid and pasted on the outside of the tower. Drivers can be downloaded from the manu's website or third-party websites with little trouble when you use a generic OS install CD. Granted some of the extra software that came bundled might be left behind, but this generally can be replaced with free downloads. Even anti-virus software can be replaced if they have their registration info, not to mention the free options like AVG. Replace the essentials, most EU's wont notice all the extra bulky crap that got left out, and will sing your praises when the system runs faster than it did out of the box.
Well, we used to do that, and got told pretty strictly that's not allowed. The reasons were
a) OEM CDs are hardware locked in many cases, and the PCs didn't come with retail licenses. This may be legal arcana, but BB has enough legal issues to go looking for more.
b) It takes a lot more time. And some manufacturers do not seem to provide certain drivers on their sites. This is bad for 2 reasons. It costs us more time, hence more money(It's not a secret BB wants to make money). Customers dislike waiting longer for the repairs as well. Plus there's the chance something won't work with by gosh and by golly drivers (again, it's not always obvious what drivers are needed for some of the propriatery stuff in the OEM machines).
c) The customer doesn't get any of the applications the machine came with. Now I know on/. we'd all rather *not* have those, but many BB customers would feel like we're cheating them out of something that *CAME WITH THEIR COMPUTER!!!*.
Hell, you can even make drastic changes to the hardware and still install legally (expect a manual call to MS to activate, a matter of about 5 minutes).
You try calling MS from your average BB store and being done in 5 minutes - especially when for certain machines they don't handle the activation, and give you another # to call. Then there's the suspician we were starting to get on activating the same "copy" of windows XP on many machines, even though each had a separate, valid product key on the side of the PC. MS reps were telling me this wasn't going to keep being authorized. Maybe they were wrong, but who am I to argue?
As for the GeekSquad fees, you guys are extortionists.
We charge what the market will bear. We're certainly not a monopoly in services. Many people are willing to pay the prices. Why would we lower them?
If I can proffer some advice, get the hell out of the DeathSquad and get a job at a real shop. You might actually learn something.
Thanks for that. It's actually currently my second job now. I work part time there. My first job is desktop support for an academic institution.
Yea, but many of the retailers Service Plans (not really a warrenty per se) will still fix that for you (and I bet, even 2 years down the road, getting a comparable laptop would cost more than $350 - most expensive Plan I'm aware of). Now, it won't be instant, might even take a month or two. So of course, factor in time - and for some people this makes it not worth it. But for others it's no big issue (and for frys it doesn't matter, they provide loaners).
And even if they can't repair it, most of the listed retail places figure equivelent replacement by dollar value, rather than by features, so if they have to replace it, they'll actually give you $2000 in store credit to get another laptop.
Interesting. As far as I'm aware, the trick at Best Buy is to dodge (or factor in) the PSP(extended warrenty) and Geek Squad Services. BB doesn't care how much the PC costs, they might get $5 from it if lucky. What they do want is to sell the add ons, the Security software, and the warrenty. That's where their money is.
Replying to myself - there is one situation where you could purchase a PC at Best Buy and not get discs due to somethign we have done. That is if you purchase an Open Item PC. Any Open Item is clearly labled, what is missing from a retail box is listed, and the price is discounted (hopefully accordingly - feel free to try and haggle, may work!).
I work at Best Buy in the Geek Squad, and as far as I can tell, most machines we get when we open the box (for a functionality check) don't have install media. They either have a restore partition, or bug you on first startup to make DVDs. I've always thought that when I'm testing it out (I can't do the media burn unless the customer pays for that), and I click "not right now", it would ask again, and AFAIK, thats SOP - and we may be wrong on that...
If they just don't have media, they come sealed in the box without it - we aren't taking it out at my store.
I'm guessing what is happening is a combination of manufactuers *not* sending reinstall media, and customers either
a) not making it at startup for whatever reason - they don't understand, don't care, or we said ask later and the program never asks later (got to check on that one) b) no option to make disks, manufacturer only provides partition (really bad if the HD goes, but I've seen this setup on some machines we sell).
The Geek Squad doesn't charge "more" (per SOP and where I work) if you don't have install discs, we just insist that you have legal install media - we don't care where/how you get them. Our fee to install an OS is the same in any situation.
The other confusion may be our modular fee structure (or maybe confusing). We bill per service, but it may be badly broken up, IDK.
There is the HD cost if you are doing COD. Then there is our install fee for the HD - $39 for a desktop, $59 for a laptop IIRC. Finally, it's $59 to install an OS, but again, *you* MUST provide legal install media. We can sell you a boxed XP copy first if need be.
If you have a PSP, the whole thing is covered under that, except you still have to provide legal install media. Due to what I think is beuracratic issues (could be legal, contractual, or just coporate is lazy) we cannot obtain restore discs from the manufacturers for you, the customer has to do that. Some manufacturers charge for restore discs, I've seen quotes from $20-$90 so that may also be the issue, but that clearly IS NOT going to Best Buy.
What we CAN NOT do is pull a CD from the back, slap in your install code and go to town, Activation, and probably legal issues make this a non-starter. This is a PITA all around, and I wish it wasn't so, but those are the rules.
I sometimes do idle in yahoo chat rooms or whatever, and provide free tech support. It can be rewarding.
The issue here is there needs to be a clear demarkation in OSS projects between the devs chatroom where they sit around and shoot the bull or discuss "inside" issues, and the official outward facing support room. If you don't want to provide any support, don't indicate that there is a support chatroom/mailinglist/forum. If you say on your site, or in your documentation, that #foo-support is your support channel, you should not be suprised when *USERS* come in asking possibly inane or boring or mundane questions. People should only be in the room to help if they want to provide somewhat respectful (and maybe somewhat professional) support.
If you don't want to do that for free (who really does want to long term?), then just note on the site/documentation either NO SUPPORT, or list terms under which you are willing to provide professional support.
But don't claim to have support that consists of RTFM n00b!
IDK, I still know many people who prefer VHS because they can record on it. DVD Recorders - at least those sold at Best Buy - are notoriously unreliable. That said, there was more to DVDs than quality. Note that it took 4-6 years from 1997 for the major shift to occur (Till about 2002, BlockBuster and such still barely stocked DVDs).
And there are the other benefits - no degradation like tapes, no rewinding, and services like Netflix. I don't see a big change in HD-DVD... And it won't happen till prices come down. Not many average people are rushing to pay $35+ for HD-DVDs, or $2-4k for a TV.
When Players are $100, TVs are $200, and discs are $5-20, then I think we'll see mass market pickup.
Slashdot Mirror
IDK, isn't this basically what GMail does? And you then use filters of some sort to view messages?
I'd say you're doing it wrong then. Though it does depend on your workflow. Where I work, we have a base windows setup. This is XPSP2 plus patches up to a month or two ago. We have a volume license. We sysprep our basic setup, and use driver genius to create autoinstallers for drivers for each machine type (sure, we could put them in OEM drivers, but we've found that if somehow you mess up any driver, the sysprep restore fails).
Our deployment of a base machine consists of:
1. Taking it out of the box (3 minutes or so)
2. Plugging it into the network and kvm switch (1 minute)
3. Turning it on, putting in a ghost network boot cd, letting it boot (2 Minutes)
4. Starting a ghostcast session to restore the base image (8 Minutes)
5. While that's going, grabbing the driver pack for the hardware onto a flash drive (part of the above 8 minutes)
6. When asked by windows, putting in PC name. (10 seconds)
7. Waiting for windows to start (3 minutes)
8. Logging on, running driver pack, join to domain (2 Minutes).
9. Deploy and test.
That's under 20 minutes, and that's not touch time - for instance a good 6 minutes or more is just waiting, so you can be doing other stuff.
Of course, if you have every desktop different, then you'll have to spend time configuring the different ones.
I wonder from a lending POV, how much is causation and how much is correlation? Looking at your follow up post down the thread (or up from here?) and based on imperfect news reports and such, due to all sorts of factors including *others* racism, minorities may not objectively be as safe a borrower.
I.E. I really don't care about someone's "race". But if I was looking at lending money, I'd be just as unlikely to lend to a minimum wage innercity single black mom as I would be to a white trailer trash single mom. Now if there are more of the former than the latter, the statistics would show higher interest rates on average for the former catagory.
But it doesn't mean the banks are racist, just that the average financial situation for a black mom is worse than for a white mom. Hence higher interest rates to guard against defaults.
This isn't to say that there isn't a lot of racism or unfairness causing bad financial situations for the average black mom vs white mom, but that expecting a company to be reverse racist (or stupid - give better interest rates to one group than equivelent members of other groups because of their race) is naive.
I don't like the idea of monthly fees - that's just me, however that said, I'd pay this fee and setup well before I'd pay for XM or Sirius...
And if someone offered something like this for TV shows and movies with a lead time similar to what I can get with newsgroups, at a similar price ($15-$20 a month), I'd pay to be legal. I care far less about owning stuff that I'll only watch once, and I'm ok with watching a TV show the day after it aired w/out commercials.
I'd like to get movies for an add on price - I'd pay up to $3 a movie, if it was released say a week or two after the theater release. Once I bought the movie, I'd need to be able to watch it for at least a week though, I'd prefer if it was available for as long as I kept up my subscription to the preferrably integrated service.
I have to say that I find any modern Linux install to be entirely painless. It's supported everything at least as well as windows, and I don't choose parts to be linux compatible.
What I have had problems with is installing new programs. I think I've tracked that down to my Windows installation expectations, that is download an installer, and run it, or a zip file and extract it. Linux doesn't seem to work that way - the only program I've successfully installed outside of the OS install is Opera, as I was able to just run the rpm.
I have a hard time liking the idea that I'm relying on the OS vendor to provide a mirror and installer/whatever for every piece of software I want to use, and if they don't, there's where it gets harder than Windows IMHO. Cause I can't YaST or Apt-Get or whatever, I have to run a make script etc, and I've yet to get that to work, though I haven't spent more than a day trying yet either.
Yea, I work at the geek squad, and I tried wearing a normal tie, and got told that I was out of uniform. Hell, I got told my pants were out of uniform because they had pleats. And let me tell you, there seems to be only one company that makes short sleeved white dress shirts with a pocket and no collar buttons, luckily they are sold at Burlington coat factory for $10.
What's worse is some cars have done this. For instance, I could never have changed the fricken BATTERY in my Olds 93 Cutlass supreme.
Some genious thought it would be cool to put it under a retaining bar, the WIPER FLUID container and CRUISE CONTROL box thingy (My mechanic knows the real term, I don't remember). It took my mechanic a straight hour to swap batteries.
This isn't me being ignorant (well, I guess I am) - the battery is a consumable - it ought to be like changing the oil! Why it's half buried in the engine compartment I'll never know.
No idea... All I get is an endless reload of a blank page with what looks to be a search box. No matter if I type or click, I get back to a blank box.
Seems broken to me.
Isn't there some quickfind in bookmarks? About the only thing I'd love to see is some search shortcut, maybe b, that you could use in the address bar to quickfind bookmarks.
What really amazes me is that Opera tends to release as many previews and betas as MS does for Windows releases, yet they still spend the first 4 point releases or so trying to get it stable again.
I'm hoping the weeklies might help have 9.0 actually be stable, but I'll not be suprised if Opera 9.0-9.03 or so are hopelessly buggy.
I have a problem with the argument "Won't anyone think of the Childeren". I on principle refuse to support anything that has that as an arguement.
The worse thing is that we are throwing away privacy rights for millions because hundereds are abused. And we're doing it to stop things that are already highly illegial. If people are already breaking the law, who thinks another law will help.
Or put another way, if a company is committing the horrible crime of distributing and profiting from child porn, in what world do you actually think they'd follow this law to keep logs?
A better question then is why it's not ok to let localities legislate pot the same as beer - some can be "dry" others can have this limit or that limit, still others could have none...
I know, Nintendo Revolution sounds cool. It makes me think it will create a whole new gameplay experiance.
Wii makes me think of... pee. And Nintendo Wii makes me think of that penny-arcade strip and Nintendo peeing... or something.
I mean, why throw out a cool sounding name that has had some marketing already to replace it with something that sounds vaguely disturbing?
As someone else said, there are MANY MANY instances where being drunk IS illegal.
But how many instances is having a 6 pack in the trunk illegial? Only one that I know of, when you're under 21.
I think the biggest thing is that MS is fighting a battle unlike anything they have fought before with IE7. That is, their competitors (on windows) aren't like Netscape or Lotus.
Firefox doesn't really have a company MS can put out of business or buy up, there is not monentary pressure they can put directly against it to kill it. At worst, it will float around berefit of the Mozilla Corp, but someone will still likely be working on it, be it IBM, Redhat, SuSe, or j random hacker.
Opera isn't primarily tied to Windows, they make much of their money on embedded stuff - licensing in Adobe GoLive, set top boxes, and of course their stronghold, the mobile phone market - where MS is still having difficulty penetrating, and where IE whatever is far from a favorite.
And there is lots of wanna-be tech market buzz, not to mention decidely non tech buzz on alternative browsers. NYT ads for FireFox, CERT warning not to use IE, and all the continuous press in magazines and sites about Safari, Firefox, and Opera every time there is a point release it seems.
I'm not going to say MS is going to become a has been in the browser market. But I'm meeting more and more non-techies who use alternative browsers. And more people will hear about them due to the word of mouth.
I'm sorry you think so. The OEM CDs we do have access to are hardware restricted to the model they came with, they either won't run, or require phone calls to MS to activate. Then MS tells us we can only use that install of windows on ONE machine, regardless of the number of license keys we have on the side of computers. Maybe MS activation reps are wrong, but I'm not in a position to argue with them.
Don't know how long you've been working there, but from the post, you have *no* business calling yourself a geek! Working on customer machines when you don't know what the hell is going on in your own shop??
As a part time employee at the retail level, I am not privy to coporate legal affairs, their contracts, or the specifics of said contracts.
I also have no specific idea how customers are ending up with machines without restore CDs. I can, however, list what I believe to be the likely senarios - far more likely than the idea that every other member of the Geek Squad just waits for me to leave, and then goes madly removing CDs from sealed boxes...
I've never been allowed to take out a machine just for testing at Best Buy to see what might happen over a week or so to see if a reminder pop's up. No one has mentioned any issues, and the last OEM PC I bought was 2 years ago, and came with restore CDs.
I don't know where you work, but I get paid to follow procedure and create revenue for Best Buy. Not to question every procedure, or try and get manuals on corporate policys and intercompany contracts.
It doesn't ask again.
/. we'd all rather *not* have those, but many BB customers would feel like we're cheating them out of something that *CAME WITH THEIR COMPUTER!!!*.
Thanks. That's actually helpful, and I'll pass that along so our customers are advised as such. This is beneficial in 2 ways - it actually gives me a (weak) way to sell a service we never get to sell - that of making sure the customer has restore discs, and if the customer doesn't want that, they are aware there is something they *need* to do ASAP.
This is just plain dumb. The media is secondary (even in cases where other software exists on the media). What is primary is a legit license key. Use most any freakin media you want to, MS won't care as long as your key is unique, valid and pasted on the outside of the tower. Drivers can be downloaded from the manu's website or third-party websites with little trouble when you use a generic OS install CD. Granted some of the extra software that came bundled might be left behind, but this generally can be replaced with free downloads. Even anti-virus software can be replaced if they have their registration info, not to mention the free options like AVG. Replace the essentials, most EU's wont notice all the extra bulky crap that got left out, and will sing your praises when the system runs faster than it did out of the box.
Well, we used to do that, and got told pretty strictly that's not allowed. The reasons were
a) OEM CDs are hardware locked in many cases, and the PCs didn't come with retail licenses. This may be legal arcana, but BB has enough legal issues to go looking for more.
b) It takes a lot more time. And some manufacturers do not seem to provide certain drivers on their sites. This is bad for 2 reasons. It costs us more time, hence more money(It's not a secret BB wants to make money). Customers dislike waiting longer for the repairs as well. Plus there's the chance something won't work with by gosh and by golly drivers (again, it's not always obvious what drivers are needed for some of the propriatery stuff in the OEM machines).
c) The customer doesn't get any of the applications the machine came with. Now I know on
Hell, you can even make drastic changes to the hardware and still install legally (expect a manual call to MS to activate, a matter of about 5 minutes).
You try calling MS from your average BB store and being done in 5 minutes - especially when for certain machines they don't handle the activation, and give you another # to call. Then there's the suspician we were starting to get on activating the same "copy" of windows XP on many machines, even though each had a separate, valid product key on the side of the PC. MS reps were telling me this wasn't going to keep being authorized. Maybe they were wrong, but who am I to argue?
As for the GeekSquad fees, you guys are extortionists.
We charge what the market will bear. We're certainly not a monopoly in services. Many people are willing to pay the prices. Why would we lower them?
If I can proffer some advice, get the hell out of the DeathSquad and get a job at a real shop. You might actually learn something.
Thanks for that. It's actually currently my second job now. I work part time there. My first job is desktop support for an academic institution.
Actually, they do. All PSPs offer dollar value based equivelent replacement guarantees as opposed to feature based.
This is eminently fair unless you bought something at a very steep discount. Then it's not so great.
Yea, but many of the retailers Service Plans (not really a warrenty per se) will still fix that for you (and I bet, even 2 years down the road, getting a comparable laptop would cost more than $350 - most expensive Plan I'm aware of). Now, it won't be instant, might even take a month or two. So of course, factor in time - and for some people this makes it not worth it. But for others it's no big issue (and for frys it doesn't matter, they provide loaners).
And even if they can't repair it, most of the listed retail places figure equivelent replacement by dollar value, rather than by features, so if they have to replace it, they'll actually give you $2000 in store credit to get another laptop.
Not really that bad a deal.
Interesting. As far as I'm aware, the trick at Best Buy is to dodge (or factor in) the PSP(extended warrenty) and Geek Squad Services. BB doesn't care how much the PC costs, they might get $5 from it if lucky. What they do want is to sell the add ons, the Security software, and the warrenty. That's where their money is.
Replying to myself - there is one situation where you could purchase a PC at Best Buy and not get discs due to somethign we have done. That is if you purchase an Open Item PC. Any Open Item is clearly labled, what is missing from a retail box is listed, and the price is discounted (hopefully accordingly - feel free to try and haggle, may work!).
I work at Best Buy in the Geek Squad, and as far as I can tell, most machines we get when we open the box (for a functionality check) don't have install media. They either have a restore partition, or bug you on first startup to make DVDs. I've always thought that when I'm testing it out (I can't do the media burn unless the customer pays for that), and I click "not right now", it would ask again, and AFAIK, thats SOP - and we may be wrong on that...
If they just don't have media, they come sealed in the box without it - we aren't taking it out at my store.
I'm guessing what is happening is a combination of manufactuers *not* sending reinstall media, and customers either
a) not making it at startup for whatever reason - they don't understand, don't care, or we said ask later and the program never asks later (got to check on that one)
b) no option to make disks, manufacturer only provides partition (really bad if the HD goes, but I've seen this setup on some machines we sell).
The Geek Squad doesn't charge "more" (per SOP and where I work) if you don't have install discs, we just insist that you have legal install media - we don't care where/how you get them. Our fee to install an OS is the same in any situation.
The other confusion may be our modular fee structure (or maybe confusing). We bill per service, but it may be badly broken up, IDK.
There is the HD cost if you are doing COD. Then there is our install fee for the HD - $39 for a desktop, $59 for a laptop IIRC. Finally, it's $59 to install an OS, but again, *you* MUST provide legal install media. We can sell you a boxed XP copy first if need be.
If you have a PSP, the whole thing is covered under that, except you still have to provide legal install media. Due to what I think is beuracratic issues (could be legal, contractual, or just coporate is lazy) we cannot obtain restore discs from the manufacturers for you, the customer has to do that. Some manufacturers charge for restore discs, I've seen quotes from $20-$90 so that may also be the issue, but that clearly IS NOT going to Best Buy.
What we CAN NOT do is pull a CD from the back, slap in your install code and go to town, Activation, and probably legal issues make this a non-starter. This is a PITA all around, and I wish it wasn't so, but those are the rules.
I sometimes do idle in yahoo chat rooms or whatever, and provide free tech support. It can be rewarding.
The issue here is there needs to be a clear demarkation in OSS projects between the devs chatroom where they sit around and shoot the bull or discuss "inside" issues, and the official outward facing support room. If you don't want to provide any support, don't indicate that there is a support chatroom/mailinglist/forum. If you say on your site, or in your documentation, that
#foo-support is your support channel, you should not be suprised when *USERS* come in asking possibly inane or boring or mundane questions. People should only be in the room to help if they want to provide somewhat respectful (and maybe somewhat professional) support.
If you don't want to do that for free (who really does want to long term?), then just note on the site/documentation either NO SUPPORT, or list terms under which you are willing to provide professional support.
But don't claim to have support that consists of RTFM n00b!
IDK, I still know many people who prefer VHS because they can record on it. DVD Recorders - at least those sold at Best Buy - are notoriously unreliable. That said, there was more to DVDs than quality. Note that it took 4-6 years from 1997 for the major shift to occur (Till about 2002, BlockBuster and such still barely stocked DVDs).
And there are the other benefits - no degradation like tapes, no rewinding, and services like Netflix. I don't see a big change in HD-DVD... And it won't happen till prices come down. Not many average people are rushing to pay $35+ for HD-DVDs, or $2-4k for a TV.
When Players are $100, TVs are $200, and discs are $5-20, then I think we'll see mass market pickup.