Geek squad used to be competent albeit overpriced.  I now have a client machine here that was diagnosed with a series of problems over the past few months to a year.

1. bad internal nic.   new nic was installed.  It was a good one(Intel) at least.

2.   The machine would not boot into windows 7..at first it would BSOD but now it simply restarts.  All windows boot repair options failed.  System was diagnosed with a failing SSD.

3.  The system would boot to it’s XP ssd but not the Windows 7 SSD.

Once I talked with the client and then got my hands on the machine my initial opinion was this was a software problem..not a hardware problem.  First i booted ubuntu 12.x in live dvd mode.  Everything came up fine.  I then ran spinrite level2 on the supposedly failing ssd.  It came back clean.

The client verified his backups are sound so I proceeded to reinstall windows 7 on the “failed” ssd.  I’ve been running the system fully operational…the Radeon card is working perfectly AND the onboard nic is working perfectly.  I don’t know how much this client has been charged for these false diagnoses…it’s unfortunate that Best Buy has long since abandoned actual techs for simple book kiddies.

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