Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I Took My PC to Geek Squad for a “Tune-Up””.
Everyone has been there, you’re minding your own business and suddenly your computer starts acting up. Programs are crashing, it’s running slow. You get a blue screen. What do you do? Not everyone has that cousin.
That knows about computers and such and many of the specialty chains and Indie shops that we enjoyed in the 90s and the 2000s have either been bought out or have gone out of business. I mean you could take a chance on that random dude off Craigslist, but even that might not be an option for you if you happen to live in Billings instead of Boston. That is where the Best Buy Geek Squad comes in. They have so many locations in the U.S that over 70 percent of the population lives within just 15 minutes of one of their stores, but just because they’re, your only option doesn’t mean that they’re, a good option can a bunch of secret agent. Cosplay enthusiasts really fix your computer, we had to know so. We obtained a three-year-old machine from one of Jake’s friends complete with an SSD loaded up with real world software and data and carted it to our local Geek Squad Precinct. I know I know we keep on sending people to Best Buy, expecting a better result, definition of insanity, etc, etc, but, as it turns out, we’re not crazy, because this time was completely different. We brought in a slow computer to the store and got back a measurably faster one. What did they do? We know they didn’t do this segue to our sponsor the ridge. The ridge has joined with Travis Matthew for a limited run of their classic wallets. This Sleek low profile wallet is perfect for any golfer.
On the go, and now with the Travis Matthew touch, you can elevate your game in style, get your hands on the ridge wallet, Travis, Matthew collaboration today, using the link down below. After a brief interview, wherein we explained that our system was slow and we needed to do our taxes, The Geek Squad agent at the counter, recommended a system tune-up, along with their software installation service, to get us all set up with a copy of Turbo Tax. She gave us a quick pitch of their monthly subscription plan, but we naturally chose to pay. Only a one-time service fee signed the paperwork and then went on our merry way. Just under 48 hours later, we got a text notifying us that the machine was ready for pickup now, according to the Best Buy website. The system tune-up includes reviewing the startup processes, updating Windows, updating, anti-malware, repairing the registry and removing all temporary files to free up drive space to complete these tasks.
Geek Squad agents use an internal collection of tools and scripts called MRI, along with a handful of other tools that either automate or streamline typical troubleshooting. There’S nothing wrong with that on the surface, but only apps approved by Best Buy corporate are allowed to be used in store and from what an Insider told us. The approved list is quite old, with the last useful piece of software, apparently being added almost 10 years ago, through our source. We got a copy of a recent version of MRI, but even without that, we can tell from the logs that MRI left behind that. The first things they did were automated scans for Hardware problems and malware infections. This actually makes a lot of sense because a they could easily upsell Hardware repairs or virus removals. If they did find anything and B, it prevents them from wasting time on a tune-up that ultimately wouldn’t solve the problem. Anyway. In our case, though, these scans came up negative, so they proceeded with our system tune-up and tune it up. They did when we dropped it off.
Our machine took 26 seconds to hit the desktop and a little over half a minute to launch all of our startup apps. When we got it back, those numbers were down to just 20 seconds and 25 seconds respectively. That’S 22 percent faster, we’re off to a pretty good start here, but hold on after geek squad’s tuning, the largest contributor to our load. Time was IQ, which some of you will recognize as corsair’s RGB control and System Mod monitoring app.
While this is a Corsair case with Corsair fans, there’s no RGB and no sensors that IQ can use, so all it’s doing is wasting resources and it should have been removed from startup. That would have shaped another second off of our time now to be clear: we’re not advocating for Geek Squad to just start willy-nilly removing software from a user’s computer, but what I would have expected is for them to at least mention this potential savings when they return To the PC to me, that was our first clue that our agent might have been just you know following the script, though, that might not be their fault in the U.S agents. Don’T need to have any sort of certifications to work for The Geek Squad and our source tells us that the quality of service provided by a given location is largely dependent on the supervisor. A by the book supervisor will demand that agents strictly follow standard procedures and stick to the approved tools, even if that means doing a slower, subpar job for the customer. A more Progressive supervisor, though, might tend to run things more like an actual repair shop, encouraging their agents to learn outside of the Geek Squad bubble and turning a blind eye to the use of more effective, albeit unapproved tools.
We’Re told that which one you get is pretty much a coin toss. Let’S turn our attention back to our machine, though, as advertised all of the required Windows updates were applied and Windows Defender is fully up to date. Now very nice I mean neither of those tasks. Is hard but they can eat up time on the bench making them the kind of thing that a rushed technician could easily skip, whether on purpose or by accident, in their hurry Best Buy and by extension, Geek Squad is heavily focused on metrics for their employees. So the more repairs you can get out the door, the better and with limited staff.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if one of them missed one of those hey. I know you just updated, but how about another update updates? Moving on to registry cleanup, though the technical among you will know that the Windows registry is a database of settings for the hardware and software on your PC, and there are a ton of programs out there that claim to speed up your computer by repairing that registry. Microsoft does not support the use of registry cleaners and warns that at best they are needlessly deleting unused registry entries which take up negligible amounts of space and at worst they can cause irreparable harm to your operating system. That doesn’t seem to stop some repair shops Geek Squad included from contributing to the fud around the registry and promising to repair it as part of their product.
Offering our best guess is that their motivation for this is that these programs are guaranteed to find a huge number of problems, presumably making the customer feel like they got a lot for their money. Out of curiosity, we used another tool, a different one than what they used on our system, but from Best Buy’s approved list to scan our system for registry and other issues both before and after after our tune up and what’s funny. Is it actually found more problems in the registry after our service than before? We brought it in so maybe Microsoft Is Right about their own software. According to our Insider, the location is run by more.
Enlightened supervisors are less likely to use registry cleaners and more likely to spend that time. Clearing out unneeded programs, optimizing system, settings or just punting, more tuned up systems out the door. They didn’t tell us that last one. I added that, but I’m pretty sure it’s a thing bringing us to Temp files. While there are several common folders that these files are supposed to live in, temp files can be found in all kinds of random places.
All over your file system, An approved system cleaner, found almost a thousand temp files on our machine before service and just 35. After with that said, there were still plenty of random, temporary and cache files that we found in places that the cleaner didn’t look, including more than four gigabytes of unneeded Windows update downloads. So what we suspect is that Geek Squad got things a little bit out of order and cleared out temp files first before they started applying updates and installing our tax software.
I mean it’s not like the after State isn’t better, but it could have been more betterer if they had taken a moment to consider all of the different tasks that they would be doing on our machine. Of course. If this was all scripted, then it’s not really.
The text fault and it’s more of a systemic one, uh right, I guess the last thing for us to evaluate is the software installation. They they installed the software all right, I mean I’m. What more can I say? That’S 20 US Dollars well spent plus the cost of the software.
I mean I’m satisfied, I guess, but you might prefer to press next a couple of times for yourself and pick up a high quality printed t-shirt from lttstore.com with the money that you saved uh. Oh on the subject of cost, the tune-up cost us 60 US dollars that covered someone pretty inexpertly tweaking our startup programs running a temp file, cleaner, babysitting, a handful of Windows updates and then running some software that Microsoft advised them not to run. They did perform the tasks that they advertised, but I feel they could have done a couple of things better and the whole charade of registry cleaning needs to go away.
Was it worth it though? I mean this is a tough one for me. Obviously not, but if you know literally nothing about computers, and you just need that little bit of help to get things running smoothly again, it could be a lot better than wasting two days of your own time doing it then again, on the other hand, with a Short trip to the LTT forum and the same software, that’s included in MRI, most of which is either available free or as a trial that you can just download. I suspect that you could accomplish pretty much the same thing without your PC being out of commission for two days, just like our Segway machine was out of commission, so I don’t have one to our sponsor guardio as pretty much everyone knows.
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