Best Buy's $40 'pre-optimization' determined to be worthless, iPhone earbuds determined to be white -- Engadget
I used to hawk and perform these services at Circuit City (Lucky for me, I was out well before they completely tanked) and always had mixed feelings about them.
Yes, it's overpriced. But when I was working it, we sold mostly crappy, low-end HP machines to people with absolutely zero tech savvy. HP loaded on a lot of crap- a lot of crap that would trick users into buying things, or screw with standard Windows procedures. They had a "Wireless Assistant" that was a bloated piece of garbage, and we removed all that crap.
It's been a couple of years, and it was a different company, so I can't vouch for Best Buy. But we found at Circuit that people would return computers more often when they didn't get the service- and more than a few that came in to return a "Slow" computer that they were having problems with ended up being happy after we'd sold them the service.
I'll go ahead and note, though, that our Circuit was a little different. We went above and beyond the corporate guidelines on our PC services (which later became Firedog) and some of our techs were complete idiots. So, I imagine everyones' mileage may vary.
