Best Buy and Another PC Purchase

So a man walks into Best Buy to buy a computer. Stop me if you’ve heard this one …

We went to our local Best Buy at Park Meadows to shop for Margie’s new machine. We were still planning at the time to compare online, but, heck, after dinner on Friday it made sense to at least get our fingers on the potential candidates.

I was tempted to go back to the Southglenn store and see if my new friend Steven could cut me a deal, but thought I’d stick local.

First impression was, “OMG, compared to laptops, desktops are twice the machine for half the money.” Which impression remains true, alas. Though it meant we could get a better-than-mine machine for Margie for much less moolah. We definitely did these purchases in the right emotional order.

I’ve been pleased with my ASUS, so I checked out what they had. Found a very nice model with good-looking stats for only $750 (leaving off a monitor and printer and all, since we already have those). The image on the screen was sharp, etc. and so on.

We also wrote down a couple of other models they had that looked likely, including a Gateway. Then we went home and did some research.

As Sunday rolled around, we realized that we were pleased with the ASUS, and the Best Buy price was basically it. Margie did all the graphics card research and pronounced it good. So, after church we headed over there …

First off, compared to Friday night, the place was hopping. In fact it was plain old crowded like crazy.

Found the machine again … but something was very odd. The monitor was all fuzzy. When I started playing around, I discovered that the machine had (a) only 6Gb of RAM, vs the 8Gb mentioned on the placard next to it (which I think we had confirmed Friday night), and (b) basic onboard VGA graphics. I checked, and there was no sign of the NVidia graphics card that the system could find. Hrm.

We finally flagged down a blueshirt, and explained our dilemma, i.e., we wanted one of the CG5270s, but we were concerned that the unit we were seeing on demo now wasn’t what the little placard described (in terms of at least RAM and video card). (We were a bit concerned, esp. after my experience, that it wasn’t what we’d seen on Friday night, either.)

Well, very long story short, the initial blueshirt, Jack, was on loan from elsewhere in the store and couldn’t fully answer our questions. We got an assistant manager (?) helping us instead, Nina. She was a bit nonplussed about the whole graphics card difference, esp. once she looked up to confirm what they should have. (There was also an element of confusion when the nearby box turned out to be a CG5290, which didn’t have a placard out for it at all — we pondered that system a bit, as it had a nicer graphics card, more RAM and a better processor, but was selling for $300 more.)

Ultimately, they confirmed that the CG5270 should have what was on the placard, and we got an unopened (based on the ASUS tape) box off the wall, and reassurance that if we opened it up at home and it wasn’t what was advertised we had two weeks to bring it back.

We declined all the Geek Squad folderol, paid our money, and headed out.

So, an experience with Best Buy that wasn’t flawless, but they handled it all well and we got what we paid for. I’d be worried in the future, though, about buying an open box / floor model (which we’ve done in the past), given that something happened to the RAM and video card on that demo unit between Friday night and Sunday morning.

At any rate, Margie has her new computer, it has all the RAM and video power it’s supposed to, and we’ll be migrating onto it in the very near future. And Best Buy still has customers.