Costco and other rants.......

Feeling rather depressed right now and thought I'd rant for a little while. I am currently using a friends computer.

I bought a laptop from Costco about 6 months ago. While talking in the store I asked the sales rep about the warranty program. He said it was awesome and was just as good as BestBuy's warranties, but didn't cost $130(average pc warranty price). I don't know how to make since of those warranty documents so I took his word on it. All in all I paid $100 less for the laptop and $130 less for warranty. I thought I was doing great, until the day my laptop crashed. I called costco and they put me through to the manufacturer. She was the dumbest lady on earth and continually questioned what I was telling her. I couldn't access any of my information, and she knew this, but at the end of our 2 hour conversation she tells me, "Well sir sending it end we always reset all the information so you should back it up before you send it out", what? I asked her how to do this when I couldn't even get to the start up screen, and she said didn't know but, "You should back it up anyways so you don't loose any information important to you," My god I hate stupid people. I actually know my local college has a info retrieval department where they can actually get all that stuff back, but as I carefully took apart my laptop I noticed it had several "Warranty void if removed" seals, so recovery was out of the question.

Further more during this conversation she tells me that even if the laptop has no superficial damage that the repair could be turned down if the problem was caused by normal wear and tear. Are you serious? That is certainly a far cry from what a BestBuy warranty is good for, hell I upgraded two ipodes and a 360 through those guys, at zero extra cost past the warranty.

What has got me really worried is that through the course of owning it I have on several occasions downloaded multiple gigs and deleted them, then downloaded more. I am worried that this caused normal wear and tear to damage my hardrive. I had so much information on that thing. I am a junior investment geek, and while I am getting better, I have come accustomed to putting together analytical projects, I back them up when I am done, but I had over a dozen projects in the making and now know I lost it all, reference material, projects on hold, projects in current. I seriously need to look at a new way of backing up my stuff.

Long story short, is that I will never buy a computer of any kind from CostCo again, unless I decide I can fix it myself. Serves me right for not better really. And on top of it all I am 2 weeks waiting and the guy I talked to on the phone said 3-4 weeks average around the holidays. Okay ranting done.

 

IMHO, do not waste money buying a warranty on a computer. Spend the money and buy Acronis True Image. If your data is very important, create an image every few days, either on an external hd or burned to DVDs. If the hard drive dies, you can put a new hd in the computer and restore your image to the new hard drive.

Me, I make an image about once a month to my external hd. Usually before I do the patch Tuesday updates. That way, if anything breaks, I can restore the image and skip the windows updates until I find out what is going on. Those images have saved my bacon quite a few times on quite a few computers. About once a year, I burn the CDs or DVDs just as insurance if the external hd dies, I still have images available.

 

The rep probably should have said that warranty work can be turned down if its a problem caused by the user. If something has failed, and you are in your warranty period, you should be fine.

Best Buy warranties are a joke. Last repair I had, they didn't even fix the problem it was sent in for. Took 2 months to get my machine back. The machine before that, they actually destroyed during shipping. Took them three months to admit it. I got a new computer from it, but I lost all my data.

As for data backups, you can never hold another company like a computer manufacturer responsible for your data. It is good computing to back up frequently. You never know when something like this will happen.

Its a crapshoot as to whether they will reformat your computer. Depends on the problem. Point in case, I had a laptop I sent in, that had the LCD, part of the chassis, and the keyboard replaced. They did not reformat my computer.

A previous computer I sent in for repair, had a bad screen inverter. They reformatted my machine that time.

In both of the above cases, I had my machine back in under a week. The screen inverter instance was a laptop I bought through Costco. A far cry from Best Buy nonsense.

 

Actually I have never had best buy repair anything for me...EVER! They have always just handed me new stuff and said, "Here you go." But I suppose if they had ever tried to fix anything it would be a joke, lol.

 

I don't think Costco is at fault here. It is a user responsibility to keep current backups of their data. And I can assure you, the Geek Squad will not waste time trying to recover your data either as that is a major undertaking, for which data recovery facilities use sophisticated (expensive) equipment and charge lots of money for this "forensic" recovery - this can go into the $1000s, and is often worth it, depending on the value of the data.

What you might have done was to take the notebook to a reputible local repair shop where they could have attached the notebook's harddrive to another computer, and attempted to copy off your data - assuming the HD is not dead. As far as voiding your warranty, that's a problem with notebooks as they are so proprietary. If the HD is not located in a externally accessable bay, or behind an access panel, opening the case might give them cause to void the warranty.

As long as there is no visual damage to the notebook (from a drop, for example), there is no way excessive wear and tear is a factor, or could even be determined. Filling up the hard drive is not excessive wear and tear.

For the record, the vast majority of extended warranties are not worth the money. Generally, electronics are very reliable and if there is going to be a hardware failure, it will generally be early during the original factory warranty period.

If you want to be upset with anyone (besides yourself for no backup), be mad at the notebook maker, not the retailer.