Best Buy Removed Half The RAM From A Gaming Laptop Because It Said The Laptop Only Supports 32GB
A customer sent a Lenovo Legion 5 in for warranty service with 64GB of RAM.
The Best Buy repair report confirmed the laptop had two 32GB RAM sticks, but the technician said the laptop “only accepts 32GB RAM maximum.”
The removed RAM was sent back to the customer with the laptop.
Original Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1vpew29/best_buy_sold_me_a_64_gb_ram_laptop_and_it_worked/
_**Laptop specs(it supports 64 GB): https://psref.lenovo.com/product/legion_5_16irx9?tab=spec**_
Best Buy steals 32MB of RAM from customer.
Ftfy
Around $500 dollars
Did you even read the VERY short post description?
I only read headlines. Everything else is a waste of my time.
I prefer to be seen as a complete moron instead of reading for seconds.
We can’t be held responsible for inaccurate headlines.
How do you figure?
The removed RAM was sent back to the customer with the laptop.
It was in the post text, even.
Sometimes I go to best buy to buy random computer stuff like adapters and portable chargers. They always ask me if I need help and I have the urge to pull a Ron Swanson and tell them I know more than they do
I have done that. Years ago. Its been over ten since I have went to a best buy. Got asked to leave one time because I talked a couple our of a new PC. They kept telling the sales weenie it was less than a year old and this guy was trying to convince them it was already out of date. I just laughed and left
why is this a controversy though?
this type of bullshit is common across the repair industry but we expect computer techs to be scrupulous? the entire business model likely depends on scamming people.
with cars there’s at least an excuse to put up with it in most cases. it can be labor intensive and require real tools to replace a component like an alternator on many models. even a bold and confident novice is going to feel anxiety when a bolt won’t come off and think to themselves ‘this isn’t worth dealing with.’
but if you can’t figure out how to ‘wipe windows’ or replace a ram stick with the power of the internet at your disposal you deserve to be scammed. do you have a philips head from dollar general, a usb stick and did you play with legos as a child? then you can do 100% of computer repair work.
on top of that, the entire IT methodology is to run a few basic windows commands in the console like ‘sfc /scannow’ and then reinstall windows if it doesn’t work.
this type of bullshit is common across the repair industry
No it isn’t. Most independent repair shops actually know what they’re doing and care about customer satisfaction.
This only happens at “corporate” repair places, just like BestBuy.
a bold and confident novice is going to
feel anxietystrip all the heads when a bolt won’t come off and think to themselves ‘this isn’t worth dealing with.
You’d have to be naive to… go to Best Buy, for repairs.
They handle the manufacturers warranty so what the fuck are we supposed to do?!
Do exactly as the warranty says, and take it where the warranty says, so you have recourse when stupid shit happens like them stealing your hardware, or not fixing it.
and, most importantly, ignore idiots on the internet. You paid for the warranty, use it. If the products shit, you’ll get your moneys worth out of it.
I know I did when I got a dell laptop, for years after i paid like 150 bucks a year for extended warranty… and I 100% know that dell lost massive amounts of money on that deal, considering how many times they had to send people to where I was located to fix the damn thing, not to mention the multiple just straight full up exchanges they did.
and none of that would have happened if I had been a gonk and taken a screw driver to it and fucked it up worse.
If you have an active warranty, use it for all its worth.
righty tighty lefty loosy. There. You’re now more qualified for PC repair than any one working at best buy/target.
Except that won’t be valid for warranty repairs. If you want your computer fixed at the manufacturer’s cost, you have to take it to a manufacturer certified shop. At least Best Buy can handle it locally and you don’t need to sent it off.
… exactly.
Otherwise they’d be called Best Fix!
amirite?
UP HIGH ✋
Updooted purely for dad joke lol
Fuck that’s good…
Noted: if I ever get the chance to shop at Best Buy, I won’t.
I vividly remember the one time I bought something in bestbuy.
September 7th, 1997.
Whoever can guess what I bought based on that date deserves a cookie.
Is your fantasy of not going back final?
Hl1?
A cable?
I don’t understand why this is a story. “Geek Squad” sucks, is that a shock to anyone?
European so zero experience with Best Buy, but I feel we need to talk about how RAM incompatibility is no longer just a historic thing that used to happen back in the nineties and early 2000s, but one that quietly creeped back post 2020.
I manage business laptop fleets for a living. In the time of COVID-induced supply chain breakdowns, it was hard for our clients to get their hands on Custom-To-Order business laptops they’d usually get fully configured directly from the manufacturer (back then we were almost exclusively on Lenovo Thinkpads). Lead times for CTO laptops went from 2-4 weeks to 8-9 months.
Some clients couldn’t wait that long and had us shop for off-the-shelf retail units we could upgrade to company standards ourselves. In 2022 we got a bunch of Thinkpad T14 Gen3 units with 16GB of soldered-on DDR4-3200 and one free SO-DIMM slot for a RAM upgrade. Quick and easy job - we got a bunch of Crucial 16GB DDR4-3200 cookies and went to work upgrading all the machines to 32GB. Machines upgraded fine, ran memory tests fine, and deployed a Windows image fine.
A few days later, on a Monday, we were supposed to start deploying them to users. One of the things each tech would do just before final handover was to run Lenovo System Update on each unit one more time for good measure. (This was a new model and they get quite a few BIOS updates in the first year after release as teething issues get ironed out.) And it turned out that this Monday Lenovo just made available a new BIOS version for the T14G3. Mind you, Thinkpad updates were rock-solid for decades at that point. And then they weren’t.
When a machine failed to boot after a BIOS update the first thought was how lucky it was to catch a failing laptop even before it goes out to the user. “Once is an accident.”
When a second machine failed to boot after the same BIOS update, I started getting nervous. “Twice is a coincidence.”
When a third machine failed to boot, we pulled the plug on the deployment. “Three times is enemy action.”
The machines were dead. Blank screen and fans running 100% indefinitely after power-up. Had Lenovo Premier Support dispatch engineers to site. They brought replacement motherboards. They replaced the motherboards (moved over our RAM and SSDs to the new ones) and booted successfully. Ran BIOS update. Did not boot. With three new “dead motherboards” they escalated the ticket.
It took three months and two more BIOS revisions for Lenovo to tell us that “our third party RAM is the culprit”. By then we had already figured it out ourselves. Removing the Crucial sticks and letting the MB go through the automatic “memory reconditioning” process would actually bring these T14G3 laptops back to life with the latest BIOS and just their onboard RAM. Funnily enough, we had these same SODIMM sticks happily running in HP Elitebooks and Dell Latitudes without an issue. But there was some weird interaction between Lenovo’s soldered-on RAM and Crucial’s sticks.
Where Lenovo lost us as a customer was their official response when asked about the incompatibility and which modules would work: “The ones with a Lenovo sticker.”
They had no idea what the issue was. They’d tested different SODIMMs and the models that happened to work they’d relabel as “Lenovo memory” and resell with 200% markup. They refused to publish a compatibility list or support anything without their sticker.
In the meantime we got a bunch of HP Elitebook 840 G8 laptops to cover for the unusable Thinkpad stock. These came with two SO-DIMM slots and no soldered memory, and we managed to get them with 2x16GB Samsung DDR4-3200 sticks. Each stick had an HP label, too. They also worked without a hitch when we swapped these out for the Crucials.
In the end we put the Samsung sticks into the Thinkpads and - funnily enough - they still work today with HP-labeled RAM. So do the Crucial sticks in HP laptops. Our own research concluded that it was single-rank / dual-rank difference between paired up modules that was causing issues (something you can’t fully swap out if half of your RAM is soldered). We did get random freezes while testing HPs where we tried to pair a single-ranked Samsung module with a dual-ranked Crucial module. Lenovo refused to confirm that this was the real issue all along.
We even had an internal Spongebob comic about this:
After decades with Thinkpads, we went with Elitebooks. I remember it being heartbreaking for me at the time. But what was worse was the industry-wide return of the ghosts of the past: weird glitches, mysterious incompatibilities, and horrible degradation of once stellar enterprise quality control. And all of it has gone even more downhill since.
I’ll fully admit that the scenario you experienced is probable, given what’s in the article.
But the main issue is that Best Buy sell a configuration of this laptop with 64GB of RAM and this fix openly contradicts that such a configuration is possible.
On top of that they “repaired this laptop” by removing part of the product the consumer paid for. If I had a repairman come look at my washing machine and they removed the extra rinse feature because that was causing it to flood but that feature was a stock feature, I would be pissed and litigious.
The fact that they didn’t actually inform the customer is also bogus.
It appears to be a bizarre episode where Best Buy ‘repaired’ an under-warranty laptop by simply removing one of its SODIMMs, testing it worked reliably, and then sent it back to the customer with half the memory it originally shipped with installed, confusion possibly caused by a purchase made from a third-party seller.
Yep, don’t mix RAM. Soldered (cheap to manufacture) and still a slot (upgradeable) is only on paper good.
I’m not sure if this is still a thing or not, but about a decade ago there was this whole “dual channel memory access” mode that accelerated memory access for the CPU by accessing data from 2 DIMMs in parallel.
In motherboards capable of doing this, memory slots would come in multiples of 2, with specific slots being paired and if both slots of such a pair had memory DIMMs of the same size, the motherboard would use “dual channel” mode, otherwise it would use the slower “single channel” mode (it could also be forced by configuration to always use “single channel” mode)
Dual channel only really worked well if the timings on both DIMMs were pretty much the same, so people wanting to take advantage of this mode would buy memory sticks as pairs, not just having the same size and brand but even from the same manufacturing batch so that both had data access timings as close as possible.
If you occupied one of those “paired” slots with mismatched memory of the same size as the other slot of the pair and did not explicitly disable “dual channel” access on the BIOS, you could get memory problems because accessing both DIMMs in parallel had problems when they returned the memory contents at different rates or with different delays.
All this to say that maybe what the Lenovo started trying to do with the BIOS update was dual channel mode or similar, only it was pairing a soldered memory module with a memory module in a SODIMM slot and those have different memory access speeds because physical contacts and directly soldered pins have quite different electrical characteristics for high speed signals, so the former simply can’t safelly handle as high frequencies (and hence data rates) as the latter.
Jeebus! Here I am shopping for new laptop since my P53 is aging out. I don’t do much engineering work anymore so I was looking at T16 units or maybe a P16s.
I am terrified of looking at the Elitebooks since the one I had 15 years ago was complete shite.
Thanks for the story! Interesting read.
Quality control was there because competition and customer agency were there.
Now your typical customer is an ape. They are less brain than what Apple stuff was intended for in the 00s. By far.
Quality and competition are reliant upon customers with agency. While customers are now the kind of people who are secretly thinking they are almost there in inventing a warp engine, because Claude told them so.
Daamn thx for the story time, hope that laptops start shipping with CAMM2 support instead of soldered ram.
I have my machines in at Best Buy, since the Total service is $200 bucks annual, and a proper repair shop costs $300 for a single job. One of my machines had to be RMA’d, since the motherboard had a patch of pins missing. Unfortunately, Best Buy treats motherboard swaps as an extra expense, so my Total membership isn’t helpful here.
While I probably have the technical knowledge for installing things, my fingers are all butter and shake like jello. Thus, I have to rely on people to get the work done. :(
Now, is the service good? Dunno. It takes four or five days for work and diagnostics to be done per job order with the Geek Squad, and there has been many things needed to be done due to the RMA situations. I will list things that pleased and bothered me about the service.
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The concept of CPU thermal pads was novel to the person who made today’s job order. I also specified that this pad was special, as the Grizzly Kryosheet is electrically conductive and will need special handling. It bothers me that the worker didn’t know about the existence of thermal pads, seeing as it is their day job to work with PCs. They had to do research on the spot, they thought that thermal pads needing pasting before I corrected them.
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My Geek Squad is apparently full of Advanced Repair Agents - at least three ARAs. I have the feeling some are much better than others. One of them spotted the issue with the motherboard after uninstalling a huge heatsink, which is much appreciated.
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They refused to install the multi-GPU setup that I wanted in a tower. Partially because they said that space was an issue, and that the machine wasn’t booting for them, so they were being supremely cautious about the situation. That machine tended to have bootloops and 20+ minute boots for when it succeeded, and they couldn’t really work with it.
The claim about space part bothers me. This is a HEDT motherboard with four PCIe slots, with extra spacing. At the very least, it should be able to host at least the RTX 4090 Slim and one of the 3060 cards, and likely all three of them.
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They tend to discard my notes and instructions for work orders. I make a point of writing up specific stuff about the job request - technical specs of hardware, what parts I want to be especially tested, info about a thumbdrive with manuals & BIOs, requests about CMOS resetting, GPU order in the slots, ect. On one hand, they might be just simplifying the work order to what they need - but I kinda have the feeling that literacy might be an issue. Hard to say whether I am simply being arrogant or autistic?
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I do like that they send me updates for scheduling and the like. Also, I can walk into the store and get stuff done. Today I dropped off a 2014 GPU, which is to provide basic video output for a tower if all three of my ‘real’ GPUs end up in the other machine.
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One of my requests was for a USB hub that goes into a bay drive, was to be installed. It has three cables, a SATA, 2.0 USB cable, and a 3.0 cable, that all are supposed to connect onto the motherboard. The instructions are a small sheet, and I specified the motherboard, so that the techs can look up the motherboard diagram if they needed to. They moved the hub into a tower like how I requested, but they didn’t hook it up, citing liability and non-standard parts. However, their procedures might require a CPU to be installed so that they can test the part in question.
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I asked them to clean up one tower, to make it presentable for selling. Apparently they used a can of dust-off, but didn’t wipe down the fan blades or ventilation grills.
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They didn’t know about the Q-Flash+ feature when I mentioned it, and for liability reasons, wanted nothing to do with it. Which is strange. QF+ is a motherboard feature that allows a mobo that is hooked up to the PSU, to have the BIOs flashed by a thumbdrive. It takes 10 minutes, and might be safer since there is no need for CPU, RAM, and so forth to be on the board.
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Best Buy doesn’t like to hold on to parts, even if there are future work orders in the wings. A fair bit of my time with Best Buy is moving my parts and towers between the store and my residence until a work order is in place.
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It is going to be around Sunday that one of my machines should be ready for use. I am planning on selling it, once my primary has been successfully reassembled.
As things stand, I hope that I become much richer in the future. I want to be able to afford premium service from a dedicated repair shop, as this situation makes me feel uneasy.
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Geek Squad and the “Genius” Bar are the same: really fucking stupid dorks.
Not even nerds, just dorks.
What are those, who only have one circle?
Play minimum wage games, win minimum wage prizes.
If you want people who can actually fix things, why not either 1) pay a higher wage to attract talent or 2) pay a high wage so people can spend time to improve their skills?
I’ve attempted to shop at Best Buy over the past 30 years or so.
The problem is, no matter which era, none of the staff seemed to even understand my questions, let alone be able to answer them — this isn’t just electronics, but on ANYTHING in the store. “Does that washing machine have a direct drive or belt drive?” “What’s the theoretical maximum power of that amplifier?” “What are the manufacturing tolerances of that Monster cable you say is so much better than bulk electrical wire I can get at Lowe’s?”
I mean, even the Geek Squad guys just read the details off the packaging or off their reference document; no actual thought ever went into trying to help me solve an issue that would result in a purchase.
In the early 00s I made a fair bit of money as a side hustle fixing stuff that the Geek Squad had messed up.
I walked into Apple and they couldn’t tell me anything about what they were selling either. They have some ai shit they claim about their chips i was curious about.
That’s just sales in general. I remember looking for a new car at the dealer one time and told them what I wanted and they walked me over to a completely different car. I asked him what car it was and he told me it was the one I asked him about.
I worked in sales for 6 years and was proud of my knowledge but watched my dumb and downright shady coworkers outshine me. It’s depressing.
I will late you know that it is perfectly normal and nothing outrageous. The knowledge level of the employees.
Your expectations are some Karen Shit.
I take it you haven’t shopped at a Best Buy? They do two things well: have department “experts” who will shadow you and let you know in no uncertain terms that they know everything there is to know about their department and confidently give you incorrect answers (they have supervisors monitoring them to ensure they are behaving in this manner) and sell you extended warranties.
Generally when I go to a store, I just want to buy a specific thing I already know I want to buy. I just want the salesperson to sell it to me. That’s almost impossible to do at a Best Buy. It’s not a salesperson issue; it’s a management issue.
The difference between being unwillingly ignorant and being ignorantly stupid is not knowing something, and thinking that someone that does know something is pompous.
Now, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt because you’re a .de Lemmy, but in American Best Buy, the people op is talking about are supposed to be salespeople who’s job is literally to know basics about what they’re selling. There’s even people dedicated to each department for that reason. Kind of like Power, if you have that there (we have it in Finland but I know it’s Swedish).
Or to put it in a term you might know, imagine going to a car dealership, and the salesperson doesn’t know if the gasoline car they’re saying you should buy is a V4 or V6, and can’t tell you how many MPG it gets. They just know it’s a car made by (brand).
In the early 00s I made a fair bit of money as a side hustle fixing stuff that the Geek Squad had messed up.
I did this for a bit in the late 90’s and early 2000s. Didn’t really do many jobs (I had two jobs and college to deal with already). Eventually quit altogether after a pastor gave me a computer to fix that was riddled with porn and malware. I cleaned it up, gave it back in good shape, and a few days later he wanted his money back because it had viruses again and said I hadn’t fixed it.
I told him I’d give him his money back if I could look at it right then and there and confirm he didn’t download a bunch of porn again. He took the machine and left without another word. It was small change stuff that was more hassle than it was worth, and that was the end of it for me. I do not need to know this stuff about people.
I miss Circuit City, a Circuit City Employee helped me turn a dvd player into a screen for my GameCube. 😔. My PalmOne Tungsten|C was from there. They used to fight for your warranty. I miss them so much.
Circuit City and Radio Shack… their customer support was probably part of their downfall.
I worked in GS for a couple years about 12 years ago. I worked with a couple really smart dudes, at least 5 of which have gone on to have successful profession IT careers. One of them is the smartest computer guy I’ve met and was a prodigy in his teens.
However, I also worked with some of the dumbest people I ever met. I had one coworker that was sending in a new laptop a customer brought back because the touch pad was bubbling up. As I was packing it up to ship and saw the paper work, I opened to look and it was the plastic sheet that wasn’t removed. That may have been the worst case, but there were plenty of other bad ones.
I do think the the OG version of GS before best buy acquired the was legit, but as businesses do, it enshitified, which when you’re paying youths less than $10/hr, you can expect shit service.
In my case, I didn’t suck and it was a good entry for me to really get to understand computers and I learned more about actually working on and fixing computer there than I ever did in college. I did put in the effort though where a lot of people are just passing through.
Back in 2014 or so, I had an issue with my windows laptop, not quite sure what the issue was, but their solution was to replace the HDD with a lower RPM one with that stupid “energy saving mode” that would aggressively halt the drive occasionally. Pissed me off, my files took over 3x longer to open. Could never recommend the Geeksquad after that.
If you ever need to find a side hustle, just fine 1 or 2 people who geek squad has fucked over and fix their shit properly. They WILL tell everyone they know and you’ll always have drinking money.
My 20s were funded almost entirely by Best Buy’s incompetence.
Sorta related but recently I had a DDR4 3600 16Gb stick die on me and G.Skill honored their lifetime warranty with a 2 week turnaround time which was awesome because I originally bought the kit for $60 and it was now $230.
Pretty much a customer for life now lol.
I RMA’d an Ryzen 5950x a week or so ago. It was a thankfully smooth process. Those things are like $490ish right now, and the window for RMAing would have closed by October.
The old CPU had problems with transient power spikes causing the machine to reboot, only being stable when PBO was turned off. I am glad to have gotten the RMA, the next owner of my Crosshair VIII tower should have a CPU that works fine.
Best Buy broke the power button on my laptop when they replaced a faulty screen and then refused to fix it for free. It took so many phone calls and emails and in-person visits to get them to take care of that shit, it was like a part-time job. In the end they framed it as “this one time we’ll make an exception and do it gratis” as if they were doing me a huge favor by addressing their own fuck up.
At the time, they very carefully crafted a mirage hidden behind carefully worded messaging and the appearance of an in-house workshop for computer repairs, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the time they were just sending the equipment out to a 3rd party repair warehouse (sometimes in another country) that clearly did not care about the quality of the work.
