Geek Squad may get a 2nd chance
I know, that back in May, I swore up and down (and across four journal entries) that I would never use The Geek Squad (Best Buy) for another PC repair; but after the sincere communications that I received from the Geek Squad founder and president, Robert Stephens, (I know... I didn't believe it was the real guy at first either) I am considering giving the local Geek Squad team a chance to redeem themselves.
As someone who works in the Servicing division of a major Fortune 500 company (yeah, I may not like Citi all of the time, but I'm proud of the customer service we give), I was extremely impressed by the fact that someone of Mr Stephen's level and position would take an interest in the sitation of a single customer, simply after having read about my situation here on LJ. His efforts, and he is actually having someone follow up with me on this, are a complete 180 degree turn around from the service impression that I had come away with in my specific case.
Current PC Sitrep:
Ok, this time, the problem is not only with one of my DELL PCs, but it's my "Girl." Last night, SATA Hard Drive #2 crashed and refused to respond to the boot up sequence. It simply returned a result of Drive Failure on a diagnostics. Apparently, this is not an unknown problem for this model of Maxtor hard drive, and even DELL has stopped using and carrying this product.
So, you might ask, why don't you just boot the PC from the remaining functional Hard drive? The problem is that Drive #2 was set up as one half of a RAID 0 configuration; so if one hard drive can not boot up in the PC, the whole PC can not boot up. Each hard drive shared one half of any bootable program (including Windows XP) in order to make that program's performance run at double the normal speed. So basically, two hard drives are shot, even though only one is broken.
I'm going to need to either buy two complete new hard drives to be set up in RAID 0 configuration, or buy an fast, large capacity single, hard drive to be the primary drive with my surviving Maxtor hard drive as a back up. Since this is my Gaming PC, and graphics editing PC, I'm not exactly sure which way that I should go. I'll need someone with more expertise on hard drive performance speeds, and product knowledge, to assist me in figuring out what hardware to purchase.
I'm leaning towards two new Seagate Barracuda Hard Drives, and possiby just keep the remaining Maxtor drive as a redundant back up for temporary work files.
Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive
Model: ST3500641AS-RK SKU: 8294632
Best Buy Price: $159.99 ea.
~~~ or ~~~
Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 320-GB Hard Drive
Model: ST303204N1A1AS-RK SKU: 8295579
Best Buy Price: $119.99 ea.
Add in cost for hardware installation, and re-loading windows XP, and you can easily see that this could run me between $300 to $500; so I'm going to have to put in a lot of careful thought as to where I take it and who gets to work on it.
As someone who works in the Servicing division of a major Fortune 500 company (yeah, I may not like Citi all of the time, but I'm proud of the customer service we give), I was extremely impressed by the fact that someone of Mr Stephen's level and position would take an interest in the sitation of a single customer, simply after having read about my situation here on LJ. His efforts, and he is actually having someone follow up with me on this, are a complete 180 degree turn around from the service impression that I had come away with in my specific case.
Current PC Sitrep:
Ok, this time, the problem is not only with one of my DELL PCs, but it's my "Girl." Last night, SATA Hard Drive #2 crashed and refused to respond to the boot up sequence. It simply returned a result of Drive Failure on a diagnostics. Apparently, this is not an unknown problem for this model of Maxtor hard drive, and even DELL has stopped using and carrying this product.
So, you might ask, why don't you just boot the PC from the remaining functional Hard drive? The problem is that Drive #2 was set up as one half of a RAID 0 configuration; so if one hard drive can not boot up in the PC, the whole PC can not boot up. Each hard drive shared one half of any bootable program (including Windows XP) in order to make that program's performance run at double the normal speed. So basically, two hard drives are shot, even though only one is broken.
I'm going to need to either buy two complete new hard drives to be set up in RAID 0 configuration, or buy an fast, large capacity single, hard drive to be the primary drive with my surviving Maxtor hard drive as a back up. Since this is my Gaming PC, and graphics editing PC, I'm not exactly sure which way that I should go. I'll need someone with more expertise on hard drive performance speeds, and product knowledge, to assist me in figuring out what hardware to purchase.
I'm leaning towards two new Seagate Barracuda Hard Drives, and possiby just keep the remaining Maxtor drive as a redundant back up for temporary work files.
Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive
Model: ST3500641AS-RK SKU: 8294632
Best Buy Price: $159.99 ea.
~~~ or ~~~
Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 320-GB Hard Drive
Model: ST303204N1A1AS-RK SKU: 8295579
Best Buy Price: $119.99 ea.
Add in cost for hardware installation, and re-loading windows XP, and you can easily see that this could run me between $300 to $500; so I'm going to have to put in a lot of careful thought as to where I take it and who gets to work on it.