10 Comments
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
What Exactly is Geek Squad Computer Optimization?
If you’ve been shopping in Best Buy lately, you may have come across laptops with a big orange and white sticker declaring “THIS COMPUTER HAS BEEN TESTED AND SET UP BY THE GEEK SQUAD” along with the specific services performed, such as an “Optimization & Restore CD Creation.” So what does this mean for you as the new owner of that PC?
More free time and less technology frustration!
A portion of the computers made available in Best Buy are put through a system functionality check that tests the hardware to ensure that when you get that brand new system home, it’s going to perform without issue. This saves you the frustration of being the one client out of thousands buying computers daily who finds themselves with a bad PC part.
Geek Squad also saves you time with this pre-setup process by going through the boring part of getting a new PC, which is turning the system on only to watch Microsoft Windows go through its initial setup process.
As part of our Computer Optimization service, we also spare you the extra time of making sure your system has all the latest Windows operating system updates and security patches. With the current state of Windows Service Packs, this can easily save you an hour or two of time between when you open the box and when you’re ready to go with your new PC.
Our Geek Squad Agents enable up to 100 system tweaks that improve PC performance and functionality, including optimized startup and shutdown, improved menu navigation, quick launch and taskbar cleanup and program shortcut creation.
Geek Squad can save you even more time by creating the restore CDs that will allow you to reload your operating system should something catastrophic ever happens to the system, or help you protect your family by installing security software that will shield your system from an unruly Internet.
All of this is done with the utmost care of our in-store Geek Squad Agents before that computer is resealed with the orange and white sticker that lets you know that the system inside is 100% ready to go the minute you bring it home, without the frustration and wasted time spent on setting everything up yourself. If your new computer hasn’t been pre-optimized, you can purchase the service at the time of sale.
Optimization might not be for everyone. But for those who want their computer to be ready to go out of the box, it might be worth thinking about.
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This is great info Derek! Thank you for taking the time to walk through this. I also have one small addition in response to a few rumors floating around out there about this service…
In purchasing a computer with this service performed on it, you as a customer are still eligible for the full return policy, warranty period, etc. as the product is still brand new! For more details contact your local Best Buy store or call 888-Best-Buy to speak with a customer care representative.
I highly recommend this if you’re looking for a quick error-free startup of your new computer as soon as you take it out of the box!
Thank you again Derek!
all i know is this is a terrible scam and sometimes "optimization" stickers are slapped on boxes that haven't even been opened and nothing has been done to them all in a effort to make more moeny on computers from unknowing consumers. this practice needs to be stopped. also, optimizatins should be an optional service offered to consumers, not something previously done to a store's entire remaining stock of an item whereby they store tries to force the consumer to buy it and charge them for something they don't want. i had to travel to 3 stores yesterday to find one not trying to rip me off and the only one that we did find by chance was because their clueless staff had mismarked all the units and not realized they even had them in stock until i found a lots of about 20. what kind of operation is Besy Buy running? Best Buy…more like Biggest Blunder
So, for thirty bucks I get the "Optimization" by the Geek Squad. Isn't that exactly the same as if I turn it on and have "Automatic Updates" download and install all the latest updates from Microsoft? Such a deal!
Q: What Exactly is Geek Squad Computer Optimization?
A: a service that does nothing to improve computer performance.
in short some might say a scam
LOL …..approve me Oh wise ones
nice to see Best Buy not only charging more for a computer than their competitors, but also charging a fee for a service that’s built into windows. I’m sure they’ll defragment your hard drive for you, too. oh wait, that’s automatic since Vista, too…
100 Tweaks? i’m sure they do. obviously they aren’t turning off services, because those might actually come in handy for a customer, and obviously 99.99% of Best Buy computers come absolutely LOADED with bloatware, from AV trials, office trials, and about 3 different browsers, not to mention “helpful” dock programs that OEMs blatantly rip off from good companies. So what’s optimized? do you guys put another coat of polish on my Windows 7 interface for me?
There isn’t a thing you can do on your PCs to tune it up that Windows doesn’t do automatically. Not like you can remove bloatware.
30 Dollars for Free Updates from Microsoft? no thanks, i pay for my internet, that’s enough for me.
The day you need to optimize a brand new Mac, Steve Jobs will fire the engineers who made it.
I dont know about a windows machine, have not used them for 6-7 years, but being an IT professional, I dare to say, selling optimization options for a mac, is really nothing you need, ever.
Garbage. What a load of useless crap. It must be so easy to con users with this scheme huh.
Andy sounds like he works for Best Buy so i wouldnt listen to him either.
Instead have a read from this article.
http://consumerist.com/2010/01/consumerist-invest...
Nice how they delete all of the negative comments. This service is a bunch of BS and pushing "pre-optimized" machines while claiming all non-optimized advertised machines are sold out is an illegal bait-and-switch move. This service is crap. The optimization is crap. Check out the sources below. We shall see how long this comment remains…
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/01/best-buys-optim...
http://consumerist.com/2010/01/consumerist-invest...
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/05/best-buy-cau...
My major issue with this "optimization" is that it simply reflects an alternate set of settings that Geek Squad recommends but that Microsoft does not. Anyone who cannot make these changes for themselves likely cannot unmake them either, and worse — they have no idea specifically what changes were made.
For example, one of the optimizations included is to boost the priority of foreground processes over background processes beyond what Microsoft recommends. This can make the machine less responsive as a media host. How would a person who found their computer not responsive as a media host have any clue that Geek Squad had tweaked their registry to "optimize" their computer so that background processes are slower?
Specifically, I do not believe Geek Squad's choices are any better than Microsoft's, in fact, in many cases they are worse. And most people will have no way to find the problems because they don't know what changes Geek Squad made, and any technical support they are likely to get will assume that these things have not been tweaked.
$30 to get Geek Squad's idea of tweaked over Microsoft's strikes me as a bad idea. Microsoft has much more experience with the varied ways people use comptuers.