Re: Best Buy Vista Return Policy

In article <etrtc3dafp637vtpr600ah9nc8ln2j92il@xxxxxxx>,
Scott in SoCal <scottenaztlan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

tmgriggs@xxxxxxxxx said in misc.consumers:

Never, ever, shop at Best Buy.

Good advice.

My business is now Mac based and it will stay that way.

Now that's just plain stupid. Your problems were due to defective
hardware from Sony, compounded by shitty customer service from Best
Buy. Vista had ZERO to do with it. If you bought defective Macs from
Best Buy #383, you'd have had the exact same experience.

I work in the IT industry and I deal with a lot of computer technology.
Every summer, I volunteer to help set up students' computers in dorm
rooms at the university where I work during move-in weekend. I set the
computers up for wired network access if the student has trouble
following the directions or if there's a problem with the security
set-up script we use to set up the laptops.

This is how I am spending this weekend. Just yesterday, I worked on two
or three Sony Vaios that had trouble connecting to our dorm network. All
were running Vista. Other than getting onto our network, they were
running Vista fine. One Vaio was a surprise to me though.

The girl who owned that laptop said it was new. She said she bought it a
couple of weeks ago from Best Buy. I have no idea which Best Buy though.
When she took the laptop out of the box, it wouldn't work properly. She
didn't say what the problem was, but she returned it to Best Buy to be
fixed. She said a technician there rebuilt the OS and gave her a new
system disk, which she forgot to bring with her.

The first thing I check when I work on a student's computer is what
software is installed on it, then I "decrapify" it of all the
unnecessary junk. She had Vista Home Premium, which is fine for those
who want to run an overly expensive OS, but what surprised me is that
this was a freshman incoming student, no declared major, yet she had all
sorts of expensive Microsoft software on her laptop such as MS SQL 2005
Server and the .Net development tools. What I suspect Best Buy did was
simply swap out her new computer for a used one.

The computer had a lot of software on it that no undeclared freshman
who's a novice at computers would have. Many of the default settings for
how Vista operates were also changed, and I seriously doubt this girl
would know how to do that. I also asked her if her dad used the computer
before or an older brother, but she insisted it was new from Best Buy.
We got Vista to work without too much effort, but I think this girl was
ripped off and given a used laptop, in my humble opinion.

I am a long-time Mac user, but if I bought a non-Apple laptop, it would
be a top-of-the-line Sony Vaio with the dual 250GB hard drive, Blu-ray
optical drive, and HDTV support, but not from Best Buy. Sony makes nice
laptops. I also know the sales account manager for the east coast United
States and he would flip if he heard someone say that Vaios are not
compatible with Vista. Oh, and I know at least one key sales person at
Sony who bought his wife an Apple laptop, not a Sony, because he didn't
want to spend his time supporting Windows for her.
.