Best Buy Store Purchase

[abhammer]

I recently had a very bad, experience with Countryside Illinois store. I bought a laptop then one week after purchase the hard drive went down completely. All of my data was lost as well as two programs that had been installed on the laptop. In fairness i asked if the programs could be installed on the laptop i got as replacement. Nope, i was told i would have to buy them again. Very , petty and to me bordering on criminal practices. Poor place to expect good cutomer service from. I used to be a big fan of BB. I wish I could complain in a way that would show what they did to me but there really is not. Thats the sad part of dealing with a big company. They really dont care that much about being fair with any individual because there are thousands of other people ready and willing to fill the gap from the dissatisfied soul who quits them. All i can do is tell every family member, friend and acquaintance about them.

[nckhammond]

Did you buy their service plan? Which programs, office would be fairly easy to relicense thru Microsoft, ,most everything else you would need to contact the manufacturer of the program and try and get another license.

[Faith-BBY Senior Social Media Specialist]

Hey there, Abhammer, 

When customers visit our stores, we hope for amazing experiences that leave them always wanting to come back. It is disappointing to us to hear that you haven't had the best experience, and while we wouldn't be able to guarantee any time of specific outcome, we'd love the opportunity to take a more in-depth look into your purchase.

To take a look, we'd just need you to send us over a private message with your phone number, full name and email.

You can send a private message by selecting the darker colored box to the far right of my signature below. 

[abhammer]

Your response is appreciated Faith. In response to your comments:
1. Yes I did have an active service plan ($199 for year) as I recall

2. MS Office and Paintshop Pro by Corel (both $50 approx.) had both been installed on the laptop at time of hard drive failure. I realize both could have been reinstalled on the new laptop that I upgraded to by store geek squad. The problem is that I could not get the store to reinstall or give me the activation keys to do it myself since they dont keep the key information. Given the very minimal cost of the programs and the fact I was paying for a service plan, it really made me realize that the corporation pays only lip service to fairness.

[abhammer]

NickHammond: Why would Bestbuy not accept responsibility for just reinstalling the two lost applications considering that I had an active "total service" plan and the failure of hard drive was unforseen and stemmed from a product that obviously had a design flaw.

[nckhammond]

I agree with the customer on this one, at least for office. Sence he has a service plan. No clue on the coral product. Generally your office key is tied to your Microsoft account, you should be able to log in and reinstall it. Sometimes it takes a phone call to Microsoft automated activation server.

You would have to contact coral assuming you tied it to an email or somthing directly ether way. I dont see how best buy could have helped with that one .

[abhammer]

Nick please help me to understand your perspective which is , i think the same as the mgr. At the local store. If i purchased software that was lost through a product malfunction, why would'nt my service plan (as well as the principle of fairness ) just put two installations of the original software onto my new computer to make things right
Otherwise I end up paying $100 for software I no longer own and cannot receive restitution for. Thanks Nick for at least some awareness that my situation was handled unfairly and at odds with the goal of honest customer concerns

[nckhammond]

I dont remember thier GSP covering loss of software, however I do believe it covers some software problems.
My position is that if you were able to provide them with licence keys they should reinstall for you. But they are not liable to the cost of the keys.
Office is generally as simple as logging back in with the same email and password you setup to log into windows (your windows live account) so they should he able to handle office.
However most other software you would need a key from the manufacturer. Often this is done by email or calling them get get a replacement key.

[nckhammond]

Of course office you can probably do office yourself also, pretty sure all you do is goto office.com and sign in to your account. To ether redownload regular office or set up office 365 agsin depending on what you had.

[nckhammond]

I dont want to break the rules here, but I can also tell you that the European Union passed a law awhile back requiring that software keys on computers marked recycled can be resold/reused.... so there are places to purchases those keys legitimately online very inexpensively. If you do that route make sure the key is from an English speaking country, I made that mistake once, lol.