Monday, February 18, 2008

"Bust" Buy strikes again

I'm glad to see someone is finally taking a stand against them.

We bought a computer from them. Once. They talked us into buying the extended warranty. It was an HP. After a while, we started getting messages that warned us of imminent hard drive failure. We were glad at that point we'd shelled out the extra money. It's amazing how similar our story is to that woman's...

We loaded the CPU into the car and headed for the closest store, about 45 minutes away. They boot it up, and there's, of course, no message. Finally after booting it about 5 times, the message appears. OK. We have to send it to the service center in Denver and it will take about 3 - 5 weeks. (Now that I know better, I think, "What?? Three weeks to replace a plug and play hard drive??") But at the time we didn't think anything of it, and after all, we were heading to London for 3 weeks, so it was perfect timing.

We get back and no computer. For the next two weeks we hassled the store. At one point they freely admitted that they had lost it, but never offered us compensation. Finally, we discovered that our computer was in California. It had been placed on the wrong truck and had gone to Cali with a load of computers that were to be recycled.

So. Let's think about this for a second. The original store was in a town that was home to a huge HP plant. HP computer... One would think a hard drive would be easy to get a hold of. But no, we had to send it two hours away to Denver to have it fixed. Yet it ended up even farther away, in CA.

They truck it back to Denver. And we wait again, because it still needs a hard drive. Finally they put the new drive in. It doesn't work. They have to send for a new one. Days later the new one arrives, they put it in. Oh, and by the way, we can't seem to recover the data off your old drive. It's finally ready and they tell us that it will be another week before we can have it back because we've missed the weekly truck back to the original store. WTF??? Give. Me. My. Damned. Computer. BACK!

My hubby and I decided we didn't trust another truck anyway, so he drove down and got it.

I guess we were lucky, they found ours. But this article makes me wonder how many people go through this every year?

We boycotted Best Buy after our computer run in, we continue to do so to this day.

For me.

It's been a long winter. Mentally, I feel even worse off than I was before, though things are finally looking up. I abandoned the gym. I...