Best Buy Electronic Store deliberate misguidance?

October 19, 2009

I need some guidance on handling a problem I recently experienced through Best Buy. My mother took her computer in because it was acting extremely sluggish and freezing up. Initially they told her it was .99 for a diagnostic exam. Later in the week she recieved a phone call telling her to fix the problem they needed to run extensive diagnostics and repair which would cost an additional 9.99 because they found viruses. They took our the viruses and installed some childsafe software and the total came to 0. They then called and said they discovered it was actually a bad harddrive and it needed to be replaced (an extra 0). Since replacing the harddrive will completely eliminate the work they did previously, I am wondering what our rights, as customers are. She specifically asked if she it was cheaper to buy a new computer and was told her computer is good and should last about 3 more years. Should they have been able to diagnose the bad harddrive from the inital tests

Constant CRC errors in rar files?

August 31, 2009

As of two months ago nearly all the rar files (r01,r02,r03,etc) I download that are between 40mb-100mb never extract properly.
These are the error messages I get

With 7z – "CRC failed in ‘name of file’. File is broken"
With Winrar – "Packed data CRC failed in ‘name of file’. The volume is corrupt" with WinRAR (tried several versions)

Now I know you can set winrar to ignore the message and continue. But I need to know, is this due to some sort of hardware failure?
I ran memtest 86+ for 14 hours with no errors. Possibly my harddrive is going? (despite not finding any errors with hd diagnostic software)

So then I decided to move the exact same files over to my old computer. They extract perfectly. So its obviously not caused by the download source.

The strange thing is I can extract 1gig rar files perfectly. But if the 1 gig extracts into smaller rar files I cannot extract those.

I already replaced the RAM with new memory. To no avail.

If this helps my specs are :
Windows 7 operating system (tried it on my dual-boot Windows XP SP3 as well)
ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard
8 Gigs Crucial Ballistix DDR2
500gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drive
1tb Western Digital external drive
ATI Radeon 2900xt graphics card

Oh, and i’ve formatted my harddrive twice since these errors. I’m hoping its something as cheap as replacing the CMOS battery. 😛
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Solidus – I know the files aren’t corrupt due to the download itself because the exact same files extract perfect when I move them to a different computer.
Oh and i’ve tried re-downloading. No luck.

Doing a clean reinstall of Windows XP using an Upgrade cd?

August 11, 2009

I currently have Windows XP Pro edition, and would like to start over with a clean install on the same computer, I am not able to locate my old cd’s to prove that I am eligible for an upgrade.

Any suggestions on ways around this?

I have also read about installing a new copy of XP on the same harddrive to co-exist with the other copy of Windows xp.

Any thougts are appreciated.
Thanks
Excellent idea, thank you.