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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.