Laptop advice

[progree]

19. Geek Squad -- this was back in 2000 or so, but I had HORRIFYINGLY AWFUL

Last edited Wed Aug 17, 2022, 11:10 PM - Edit history (1)

service from them on a file recovery project where they supposedly recovered files from a hard drive from a computer that no longer works for example.

This was back in the old days when they burned what they recovered to CDROMS (600 MB each), it took 5 of them.

Anyway, they didn't do even the most elementary quick check that would have shown some of their CD's were unreadable - not only on my equipment, but their equipment too!!!!!!

Other CD's were OK except they were missing lots of files -- a simple utility that existed at the time and I had used for years before that -- BeyondCompare -- and still use -- that simply compared what was written on the CD to what was on the hard drive, file by file and byte by byte would have revealed that. There were other such utilities around that did that. They admitted they didn't do anything like that, and that the software they used to make CD's didn't have any such checking functionality.

Problems writing CD's and DVD's were and are commonplace (I've written many "coasters" or partial "coasters" myself), so that was just sloppy sloppy careless careless shameful shameful deplorable deplorable work.

I made them do it over and it came out OK. (Thankfully I could verify that because I had backups, so I put my backups on my new computer in a different location and compared it to what they had done, using BeyondCompare).

But had I not and discovered the problem until say, years later, and had I not had good backups, I could have been screwed, losing years of work. (For sure, never ever throw away any old hard drives or backups, ever.)

Like I say this was back in the early days of Geek Squad -- I believe they had only one location at the time -- and long before BestBuy acquired it. So I'm delighted that they apparently have gotten a lot better since then.

Note to myself: This is off the top of my head recollection -- I can dig for letters I wrote back then about it for the exactiness and details.