Geeksquad in the UK

malcybood

I've heard the American contingent of the forums talking about Geek Squad as a company. I was browsing the carphone warehouse website checking in if they had any sim free iPhone 3Gs yet as I just refuse to go onto the o2 network......anyway as I was browsing and seen an advert for the Geek Squad and thought am I on the US Carphone Warehouse site???????

Indeed I was not, they're coming to the UK! Not sure how new this news is but it seems pretty recent from the way they've worded their website.

Geek Squad with 24 Hour Technology Support

Don't really want to slag them off but all I'm saying is I would NEVER pay someone £99 to come to my house and install my laptop or wireless router. You could pay the 10 year old kid next door £10 to do it if you were that stuck! The flip side they have no technicians in my area so there may be an opening LOL......or not

Ah well there must be a market for it I guess.

Kaminsky

malcybood wrote: »

You could pay the 10 year old kid next door £10 to do it if you were that stuck!

The trouble with little johny next door is they cause half the problems with people's home equipment in the first place. At least in my experience of being hit up by work users about their home equipment, you can typically catagorise the cause being one of two main things. They went happily browsing away into darker territories of the internet or they let some "little johnny from next door" type character do some whizzy things on their pc for them and now this or that has completely stopped working and little johny hasn't a clue how to fix it.

My kids are all under 10 and get some pretty good IT training in school as do most kids in primary schools these days. Until this generation are matured, there will alway be a need for home repair.

I imagine it could be highly profitable if franchised and advertised properly. Doubt the actual repairer tech will see much of that money though.

malcybood

OK 10 year old was maybe a bit of an exhaggeration, however my point there was £99 call out to perform some basic tasks is a bit steep IMO and a little patience most home users could do it themselves using wizards in Windows......

I mean come on, pretty much every ISP sends home users step by step instructions how to enter a wpa key ADSL username and password into a router and connect their PC to it via wireless - my Mum done this herself and she has basically no IT/PC experience........autorun CD job then next next next!

Setting up a Windows workgroup or something I admit she would need assistance but change the workgroup name to match one other PC then reboot the PC is what we're talking about charging £99 for. Plenty of guides on how to do this online.

Maybe it's because I don't tend to deal with home users, I just think some franchises out there like one I seen in a well known PC retailer's tech service charging £70 to do a data backup, not a ghost image.....a data backup i.e. my documents