My good Friend, and well known private IT consultant, Dave Baker, forwarded this to me back in August of 2008. This is his first hand account of an epic Geek Squad FAIL he encountered over the weekend. The photos are his. With Dave’s permission, I give you the following:

Dave reports that several independent consultants, as well as former Geek Squad customers have reported the they have encountered the same form of computer vandalism or poor service. Dave says, “this practice is apparently widespread and becoming known to the public.”

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Subject: Why we don’t call Geek Squad – Ever!

From: Dave Baker <no2g33xqu4d@hotmail.com>

Date: Tue Jul 29, 2008

Offender: Best Buy, Rancho Cucamonga, California.

After finding out I do I.T., my propane guy told me a story. He had

just gone to “Best Buy” (yeah right, I am using that term more loosely

than ever) and bought a new laptop (HP with Vista) for his wife. He

said that his older desktop failed (somehow), but those great Geek

Squad guys were AWESOME and had been able to retrieve all of his family

pictures for him. He was very happy with that – AND those great guys

got him a deal on Quicken 2008.

I told him that in the future I would be happy to help him get better

stuff for less, and he was very open to my help. The conversation

progressed and he told me that his wife did all their businesses books

on it as well. Naturally I asked him how he backed that up. He didn’t.

He did say that he wanted to replace the desktop since he already had

a nice monitor and everything else, and that his wife would call me.

I set up an appointment with him and his wife, and stopped by their

business. The fun begins.

The family pictures were ALL the Geek Squad was able to retrieve from

the dead computer. Period. They did not recover the last 7 years of

QuickBooks 2005 data that IS the core of their business. Furthermore,

Geek Squad sold them Quicken 2008, which she later had to upgrade

online because Quicken will not open QuickBooks files (that they didn’t

recover for them anyway). And they sold them a wireless router to

hook up there printer even though they were happy with the USB cable

they had and they don’t have high speed internet anyway.

I fixed the printer and helped her with a few other things. I told

her that I would try to recover their business data. The deal with

my clients is usually that you forfeit your old hardware as a donation

to the school I work at.

I get the computer to my office and this is what I find:

Geek Squad cut the wires from the power supply to the motherboard plug so the power supply is worthless and a stick of RAM has been stolen from the second blue slot.

3) Geek Squad cut all of the IDE cables!

4) The Crown Jewel – Geek Squad broke the power connector off of

the Hard Drive controller.

Maybe it was innocently, maybe it was maliciously, maybe to hide the fact

that they hosed the drive. I’m going with malicious until I can solder

on a connector and get these peoples data back…

I’m so hacked at Geek Squad I can’t even express it right now.

Dave

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