Like much of the country, we are getting ready to jump back into the world of online schooling again. While we were able to fall into an okay rhythm with Jack to finish out second grade, I had him using my personal laptop for his schoolwork… which I didn’t love.
I have two main laptops that I use: my work laptop (provided by my job) and my personal laptop (I purchased it from my last job when I left for a great deal). I also have my previous personal laptop that has been sitting on a shelf for a year or two.
That previous personal laptop is the one that I was hoping to fix up for Jack to use. A couple years ago when I was doing an iTunes update, it went all crazy. When I would try to turn it on, I would just get a blank black screen. Since I had a new personal laptop, it wasn’t really a big deal, but now I needed to figure out how to fix it.
I did some googling and it was pretty clear that this wasn’t something that I was going to be able to fix on my own. I decided to try Best Buy’s Geek Squad and it looked like their typical diagnostic fee for stuff was around $150. At my best (super uninformed) guess, I thought my job would be a little more than that if it was complicated.
It was super easy to make an online appointment on the Best Buy website. On the day of our appointment, we masked-up, and checked in with the rep at the front door, who was restricting the number of people in the store. When it was our turn, I met with a nice Geek and explained my issue. She asked if I wanted them to fix it back to where it previously had been, meaning to clear off any virus issues and leave me with all my previous programs and stuff that was saved on the desktop. Or, she could just reset the entire computer and set it up like a brand-new laptop.
Well, I knew that I had a ton of stuff on the laptop… but considering that I hadn’t accessed it in at least a year and a half, did I really NEED any of it? I decided to have her reset the whole thing and then braced myself when I asked her for the cost.
$40
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! It literally cost just $40 to get my old, crappy, virus-ridden laptop totally cleaned off and reset! And I’d been putting this off for over a YEAR!?
Wow.
Sure as can be, when I picked up the laptop the next day it was in perfect, reset condition. FOR $40!
The only drawback was that we no longer had Word or Excel installed on it. However, the nice lady Geek came through for us again and pointed out that many school systems offer the entire Office package to students for free. I checked our school’s website when we got home, did a quick download and BOOM we now have Word and Excel downloaded for an additional $0.
So, if you have an old laptop sitting around that needs a tune-up I would absolutely recommend giving the Best Buy Geek Squad a try. This isn’t sponsored or anything, I was just really pleasantly surprised at how helpful, knowledgeable and inexpensive they were. And now I don’t have to worry about Jack accidentally deleting off my entire bills spreadsheet off my personal laptop!
Fantastic information! I will pass it on.