Gouged By A Geek

What is it they do? What is a geek? A person who is interested in technology, especially computing and new media. A geek will generally do some sort of computer repair. Most people with computer issues will call on a geek to assist them. comments

What does it mean to be “Gouged By A Geek?” Geeks are meant to help the customer with their issues. These repair technicians will take advantage of you. But this is not always the case. What does this mean for the natural consumer?

Technical gods, or technical frauds Most places that have computer repairs don’t train their employees. Most of the time its viewed as a business to make money. So these “geeks” are not always knowledgeable of the issue.

And the result Give you a fake diagnosis using technical terms to make it seem worse. Up the price of common parts to make a bigger buck. Even take money under the table to make more for themselves.

Prices and Geek Squad Geek Squad and what they do: Repair crashed hard drives Help protect and back up important data But are they really properly trained for this? What about prices for parts? They charge ridiculous prices for components such as ram. But you can get a 1gb stick for $44.99

Personal Experience With Geek Squad Took it in to get a piece of RAM installed. Cleaned my computer of all virus’ and such before I turned it in. They took five hours to install one stick of RAM. And also “removed” virus’ that were in my computer. In the end charged me close to 120 dollars.

How to prevent this Do your research on the company you plan on going to. Do it yourself, the internet is a reliable source. See if the company you bought it from can repair it.

Comments Is this story somehow an example of bad journalism? I think it's good journalism. Computer repair (just like car repair and health care) are problems that free markets just don't solve very well. There's no way for consumers to make informed decisions since diagnosing the problem is the job. Most people not only can't diagnose these problems themselves, but don't make this type of purchase very often, and have little or no objective data to go by. It's a tough problem.-timeOday As the parent poster said, it's not that "geeks" in general are untrustworthy. It's assholes that seek to make money off their geekdom that inspire spite. If I had a dollar for every time someone brought me a computer and said "The Guy at Best Buy said the motherboard is dead and it will cost $400 to replace" only for me to go into safemode and remove spyware/virus bloat and fix the computer, I'd be paying someone to make my Slashdot posts for me!-eepok In other news, some business people are shady and try to rip off consumers! See the groundbreaking report tonight, at 7!-sloppyjoes7

A geek in action!

And now you know!