Best Buy
What do you do when your laptop crashes? Well after last year’s big crash I got wise and invested in an external hard-drive.The drive from Canso to Best Buy where I initially bought my laptop is three plus hours from Canso, so the data crash was especially inconvenient; a long drive to the Best Buy outlet and then waiting around until they could identify the problem and tell me how long it would fix. Lucky for me I’d taken my daughter’s advice when I bought it- a sort of insurance policy against the “planned obsolescence syndrome,” and signed up for the three year warranty.
Best Buy’s Geek Squad down in Dartmouth were amiable enough. They recovered the data for a fee, suggested I bought an external hard-drive as my data back up source, and returned my laptop cleaned of data and apparently as good as new. The real problem though was that I didn’t really want it as good as new, I wanted it as good as it was just before it crashed, that is with all my data intact. At the time I counted my blessings. After all, what price data? Priceless? So I willingly went away thinking it was a
lesson learned, though my pocket was lighter to the tune of around $250.00! Now 10 months further along, I am in the middle of backing up my data to the external hard-drive when it grinds to a halt. The solution to my data storage has just died on me.
External hard-drive by Simpletech
So we call the manufacturer, Simpletech, and ask them for help. “You must have dropped it!” was the response. “No, we were in the middle of a download when it ground to a halt,” we said. So, it seems that it must indeed be a fault with the equipment after all. “Yes, ship it to us: No we don’t do data recovery,” was the advice we got from Simpletech.
Back to Best Buy, this time in Newmarket, Ontario. My spirits rose to their words, “Yes, we can look at that for you!” It was looking hopeful. Then my hopes for a resolution to the problem without incurring another round of data recovery costs were dashed. “John” (an exceptionally skilled customer relations negotiator at the “Geek Squad” desk), gave an in depth account of Best Buy policies as we discussed the “fairness” of my having to pay yet again for data recovery. I wondered how many people actually know that that “a one year manufacturer’s warranty” from Best Buy means you ship at your own expense to the manufacturer. Did you know that Best Buy’s liability is only for 14 days, (except occasionally when it is 30 days,). I never knew that! How is it, I ask myself that Best Buy can sell an item and not have liability when it fails to perform the function it was designed and sold to do? So that’s my beef with Best Buy. It’s looking like a case of “Buyer beware!”
My solution to this? I thought very carefully about the lost data and decided that for the most part I could live without it. It’s rather like going through your wardrobe and discovering that there’s an awful lot of stuff that you don’t actually need anymore. The data I really wanted to keep, turns out to be my photos. Luckily, I did have another back up source from my photos. I never did quite trust downloading my photos, so I had never erased them from the original flashcards, except for those that were edited out on the camera. But this presented a new problem, since the incurable disease of “planned obsolescence” had also recently attacked my precious Canon camera (faulty imaging sensor,) so I now needed amulti-card reader. I have to thank my mother for this suggestion, (you have to be over 80 years of age to come up with such great ideas). Cost of multi-card reader, $49.99 (Best Buy). It seems that there is more than one way to skin a rabbit! ( A similar solution arose to therecent death of my wireless card in my laptop. It is still under warranty, but the possible loss of my new data is enough to convince me that a USB wireless adaptor for $25.00 +S&H from TigerDirect (www.tigerdirect.ca) is as good as it gets.
The sting in the tail? My brother works in the data recovery field specializing in disaster recovery software, data recovery, and data restoring with Thinking Safe (www.thinkingsafe.com) !
