My Best Buy and Circuit City complaints

So this was my first time buying a laptop. Now did I really, really need one? No. I already have an ubber 1337 computer at home. But they are pretty darn handy for school. Here are the sepcs-

-AMD X2 TK-53
-160gig hard drive
-ATI Radeon Xpress 1100
-Not sure of the chipset or mobo
-2x1gigs Kingston

The laptop did come with 1gig of memory (2x512's), which pissed me off. While I was at Circuit City, I purchased 2 gigs of some Kingston DDR2 533 that I knew would get the job done.

When I got home, I decided to see how slow it would run with the 1gig. It was borderline un-bareable. The boot up took forever, as did launching the 10 programs the thing came pre-installed with.

2 gigs makes SUCH a huge improvement over 1 gig it's rediculous. The fact they even sell laptops with vista home premium and 1 gig of memory with onboard video pisses me off. That's like saying , "Here's you're laptop you paid a grip for, have fun waiting 5 minutes for it to boot up and wait 30 minutes while it tries to install the 29 updates for Windows the first time you turn it on".

Now you might ask yourself "Why didn't you just buy a laptop with 2 gigs of memory in it to begin with?". I was on a budget, I didn't need that great of a proc or video card for for it, and their aren't any laptops for under $700 with 2 gigs of memory. And you're pretty much stuck getting Home Premium.

But you know why I think they do it? Why they sell Home Premium on laptops that should NOT be running it? So those STUPID wannabe tech guys at Firedog can get business. Oh, and they don't even sell Windows XP anymore. So unless you want to go online and install it yourself, which the average user won't want to do, you're screwed.

Here's how I think the ordering of the laptops goes down-

1) They order configured laptops from Acer, Sony, HP, and other companies with low system specs.

2) Tell them to install Windows Vista Home Premium on all of them, not even Home Basic on hardware that can't even run Premium.

3) Charge 100% more then what they probably paid them for

4) Put the laptops on display

5) Your average Joe walks in and wants to buy one. He get's talked into upgrading to more memory and a bigger hard drive. And while he's there Firedog can install them for him for some astronomical price.

That's how these things work.

And also, they wan't to charge $100 JUST TO INSTALL ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE. Are you kidding me? They charge $100 to install something you can download for free (AVG Anti-Virus).

Oh and what do they charge to install an OS? Try $129.99.

They also have this thing called "PC Tune Up". What do they do for that exactly?

-Identifying and removing spyware
-Standard virus scan*
-Clearing out Temporary files
-Clearing out Start-up files
-Configuring Windows updates
-Updating anti-spyware and anti-virus definitions and software
-PC optimization

For what price? $129.99. Oh and also, after 2-hour's, it starts costing more. But why in the world should it take longer then 2 hours to do all of that? Ok, Virus scan might take some time for the program to scan, they run an anti-apyware app, clearing out temp files and start up files takes under 2 minutse to do both, they alreayd have windows automatic updates so it does it itself, and anti-spyware and anti-virus programs update themselves when they start up.

And what is PC optimization? That consits of what? Defraging the hard drive and deleting temp files? Come on. All for $129.99? Please. That's a complete rip off.

Yes, all of these services are great to offer. We do need companies like these because generally, people aren't computer savvy. But at these prices? Please. I could charge half that and do it in half the time they do all that stuff.



Oh man, and what REALLY REALLY REALLY makes me mad, is I've only talked to one person at Circuit City, ever, in my whole entire life, that knows anything about computer hardware. Once. Granted, the guy did know his stuff, he still didn't know that the Intel Core 2 duo desktop procs are used in some laptops. But, he knew his stuff besides that.

I once had a FireDog guy try and tell me the 8400M was the highest end mobile graphics card they make.

THEY EVEN SELL COMPUTERS WITH 4GIGS OF MEMORY THAT RUN WINDOWS VISTA 32-BIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How stupid is that! Have fun never using 512megs of that.

And at Best Buy. Now I'm not saying they're all that way, because they're probably not, but the people I've delt with there are just as bad as they are at Circuit City. I went there to purchase a new router awhile ago. I talked to 3 sepereate people, and only one of them knew anything about routers. He happened to be going to school for networking, so that was a good experience. But the other guys were knuckleheads.

One time, quite awhile ago, I was at Best Buy. I can't really remember why I was, but anyway. I was talking around, and I over heard a conversation between an employee and a customer. The customer said he needed a new power supply (The poor soul had evidently never heard of Newegg). The employee does what he should, and asks him what kind of hardware he's running. The kid's running an older Athlon with an 6800gt with a gig of memory. So what does the employee suggest to the customer?

A 600 watt power supply.

I couldn't believe it when I heard it either.

I wanted to slap the employee. That's a perfect example of an employee taking advantage of a customer who obviously didn't know nearly as much about computers as he did.

I realise I just went off on a tanget about a number of things and their are probably numerous spelling and grammer errors in this as well. But man, people make me so mad. I should just start up my own computer/laptop/home entertainment store. I would ONLY hire people that knew their stuff and wouldn't take advantage of customers who didn't know as much as them, and I'd be the only store in my town that wouldn't rip people off.