Best Buy Removed Half The RAM From A Gaming Laptop Because It Said The Laptop Only Supports 32GB
A customer sent a Lenovo Legion 5 in for warranty service with 64GB of RAM.
The Best Buy repair report confirmed the laptop had two 32GB RAM sticks, but the technician said the laptop “only accepts 32GB RAM maximum.”
The removed RAM was sent back to the customer with the laptop.
Original Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1vpew29/best_buy_sold_me_a_64_gb_ram_laptop_and_it_worked/
_**Laptop specs(it supports 64 GB): https://psref.lenovo.com/product/legion_5_16irx9?tab=spec**_
You’d have to be naive to… go to Best Buy, for repairs.
Otherwise they’d be called Best Fix!
amirite?
Fuck that’s good…
Noted: if I ever get the chance to shop at Best Buy, I won’t.
European so zero experience with Best Buy, but I feel we need to talk about how RAM incompatibility is no longer just a historic thing that used to happen back in the nineties and early 2000s, but one that quietly creeped back post 2020.
I manage business laptop fleets for a living. In the time of COVID-induced supply chain breakdowns, it was hard for our clients to get their hands on Custom-To-Order business laptops they’d usually get fully configured directly from the manufacturer (back then we were almost exclusively on Lenovo Thinkpads). Lead times for CTO laptops went from 2-4 weeks to 8-9 months.
Some clients couldn’t wait that long and had us shop for off-the-shelf retail units we could upgrade to company standards ourselves. In 2022 we got a bunch of Thinkpad T14 Gen3 units with 16GB of soldered-on DDR4-3200 and one free SO-DIMM slot for a RAM upgrade. Quick and easy job - we got a bunch of Crucial 16GB DDR4-3200 cookies and went to work upgrading all the machines to 32GB. Machines upgraded fine, ran memory tests fine, and deployed a Windows image fine.
A few days later, on a Monday, we were supposed to start deploying them to users. One of the things each tech would do just before final handover was to run Lenovo System Update on each unit one more time for good measure. (This was a new model and they get quite a few BIOS updates in the first year after release as teething issues get ironed out.) And it turned out that this Monday Lenovo just made available a new BIOS version for the T14G3. Mind you, Thinkpad updates were rock-solid for decades at that point. And then they weren’t.
When a machine failed to boot after a BIOS update the first thought was how lucky it was to catch a failing laptop even before it goes out to the user. “Once is an accident.”
When a second machine failed to boot after the same BIOS update, I started getting nervous. “Twice is a coincidence.”
When a third machine failed to boot, we pulled the plug on the deployment. “Three times is enemy action.”
The machines were dead. Blank screen and fans running 100% indefinitely after power-up. Had Lenovo Premier Support dispatch engineers to site. They brought replacement motherboards. They replaced the motherboards (moved over our RAM and SSDs to the new ones) and booted successfully. Ran BIOS update. Did not boot. With three new “dead motherboards” they escalated the ticket.
It took three months and two more BIOS revisions for Lenovo to tell us that “our third party RAM is the culprit”. By then we had already figured it out ourselves. Removing the Crucial sticks and letting the MB go through the automatic “memory reconditioning” process would actually bring these T14G3 laptops back to life with the latest BIOS and just their onboard RAM. Funnily enough, we had these same SODIMM sticks happily running in HP Elitebooks and Dell Latitudes without an issue. But there was some weird interaction between Lenovo’s soldered-on RAM and Crucial’s sticks.
Where Lenovo lost us as a customer was their official response when asked about the incompatibility and which modules would work: “The ones with a Lenovo sticker.”
They had no idea what the issue was. They’d tested different SODIMMs and the models that happened to work they’d relabel as “Lenovo memory” and resell with 200% markup. They refused to publish a compatibility list or support anything without their sticker.
In the meantime we got a bunch of HP Elitebook 840 G8 laptops to cover for the unusable Thinkpad stock. These came with two SO-DIMM slots and no soldered memory, and we managed to get them with 2x16GB Samsung DDR4-3200 sticks. Each stick had an HP label, too. They also worked without a hitch when we swapped these out for the Crucials.
In the end we put the Samsung sticks into the Thinkpads and - funnily enough - they still work today with HP-labeled RAM. So do the Crucial sticks in HP laptops. Our own research concluded that it was single-rank / dual-rank difference between paired up modules that was causing issues (something you can’t fully swap out if half of your RAM is soldered). We did get random freezes while testing HPs where we tried to pair a single-ranked Samsung module with a dual-ranked Crucial module. Lenovo refused to confirm that this was the real issue all along.
We even had an internal Spongebob comic about this:
After decades with Thinkpads, we went with Elitebooks. I remember it being heartbreaking for me at the time. But what was worse was the industry-wide return of the ghosts of the past: weird glitches, mysterious incompatibilities, and horrible degradation of once stellar enterprise quality control. And all of it has gone even more downhill since.
I’m not sure if this is still a thing or not, but about a decade ago there was this whole “dual channel memory access” mode that accelerated memory access for the CPU by accessing data from 2 DIMMs in parallel.
In motherboards capable of doing this, memory slots would come in multiples of 2, with specific slots being paired and if both slots of such a pair had memory DIMMs of the same size, the motherboard would use “dual channel” mode, otherwise it would use the slower “single channel” mode (it could also be forced by configuration to always use “single channel” mode)
Dual channel only really worked well if the timings on both DIMMs were pretty much the same, so people wanting to take advantage of this mode would buy memory sticks as pairs, not just having the same size and brand but even from the same manufacturing batch so that both had data access timings as close as possible.
If you occupied one of those “paired” slots with mismatched memory of the same size as the other slot of the pair and did not explicitly disable “dual channel” access on the BIOS, you could get memory problems because accessing both DIMMs in parallel had problems when they returned the memory contents at different rates or with different delays.
All this to say that maybe what the Lenovo started trying to do with the BIOS update was dual channel mode or similar, only it was pairing a soldered memory module with a memory module in a SODIMM slot and those have different memory access speeds because physical contacts and directly soldered pins have quite different electrical characteristics for high speed signals, so the former simply can’t safelly handle as high frequencies (and hence data rates) as the latter.
Jeebus! Here I am shopping for new laptop since my P53 is aging out. I don’t do much engineering work anymore so I was looking at T16 units or maybe a P16s.
I am terrified of looking at the Elitebooks since the one I had 15 years ago was complete shite.
Yep, don’t mix RAM. Soldered (cheap to manufacture) and still a slot (upgradeable) is only on paper good.
Quality control was there because competition and customer agency were there.
Now your typical customer is an ape. They are less brain than what Apple stuff was intended for in the 00s. By far.
Quality and competition are reliant upon customers with agency. While customers are now the kind of people who are secretly thinking they are almost there in inventing a warp engine, because Claude told them so.
Thanks for the story! Interesting read.
Daamn thx for the story time, hope that laptops start shipping with CAMM2 support instead of soldered ram.
I don’t understand why this is a story. “Geek Squad” sucks, is that a shock to anyone?
Geek Squad and the “Genius” Bar are the same: really fucking stupid dorks.
Not even nerds, just dorks.
What are those, who only have one circle?
Play minimum wage games, win minimum wage prizes.
If you want people who can actually fix things, why not either 1) pay a higher wage to attract talent or 2) pay a high wage so people can spend time to improve their skills?
I’ve attempted to shop at Best Buy over the past 30 years or so.
The problem is, no matter which era, none of the staff seemed to even understand my questions, let alone be able to answer them — this isn’t just electronics, but on ANYTHING in the store. “Does that washing machine have a direct drive or belt drive?” “What’s the theoretical maximum power of that amplifier?” “What are the manufacturing tolerances of that Monster cable you say is so much better than bulk electrical wire I can get at Lowe’s?”
I mean, even the Geek Squad guys just read the details off the packaging or off their reference document; no actual thought ever went into trying to help me solve an issue that would result in a purchase.
In the early 00s I made a fair bit of money as a side hustle fixing stuff that the Geek Squad had messed up.
That’s just sales in general. I remember looking for a new car at the dealer one time and told them what I wanted and they walked me over to a completely different car. I asked him what car it was and he told me it was the one I asked him about.
I worked in sales for 6 years and was proud of my knowledge but watched my dumb and downright shady coworkers outshine me. It’s depressing.
I worked in GS for a couple years about 12 years ago. I worked with a couple really smart dudes, at least 5 of which have gone on to have successful profession IT careers. One of them is the smartest computer guy I’ve met and was a prodigy in his teens.
However, I also worked with some of the dumbest people I ever met. I had one coworker that was sending in a new laptop a customer brought back because the touch pad was bubbling up. As I was packing it up to ship and saw the paper work, I opened to look and it was the plastic sheet that wasn’t removed. That may have been the worst case, but there were plenty of other bad ones.
I do think the the OG version of GS before best buy acquired the was legit, but as businesses do, it enshitified, which when you’re paying youths less than $10/hr, you can expect shit service.
In my case, I didn’t suck and it was a good entry for me to really get to understand computers and I learned more about actually working on and fixing computer there than I ever did in college. I did put in the effort though where a lot of people are just passing through.
I will late you know that it is perfectly normal and nothing outrageous. The knowledge level of the employees.
Your expectations are some Karen Shit.
The difference between being unwillingly ignorant and being ignorantly stupid is not knowing something, and thinking that someone that does know something is pompous.
Now, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt because you’re a .de Lemmy, but in American Best Buy, the people op is talking about are supposed to be salespeople who’s job is literally to know basics about what they’re selling. There’s even people dedicated to each department for that reason. Kind of like Power, if you have that there (we have it in Finland but I know it’s Swedish).
Or to put it in a term you might know, imagine going to a car dealership, and the salesperson doesn’t know if the gasoline car they’re saying you should buy is a V4 or V6, and can’t tell you how many MPG it gets. They just know it’s a car made by (brand).
In the early 00s I made a fair bit of money as a side hustle fixing stuff that the Geek Squad had messed up.
I did this for a bit in the late 90’s and early 2000s. Didn’t really do many jobs (I had two jobs and college to deal with already). Eventually quit altogether after a pastor gave me a computer to fix that was riddled with porn and malware. I cleaned it up, gave it back in good shape, and a few days later he wanted his money back because it had viruses again and said I hadn’t fixed it.
I told him I’d give him his money back if I could look at it right then and there and confirm he didn’t download a bunch of porn again. He took the machine and left without another word. It was small change stuff that was more hassle than it was worth, and that was the end of it for me. I do not need to know this stuff about people.
I miss Circuit City, a Circuit City Employee helped me turn a dvd player into a screen for my GameCube. 😔. My PalmOne Tungsten|C was from there. They used to fight for your warranty. I miss them so much.
I worked at best buy geek squad for 5 years over a decade ago. I saw best buy turn their reputation around with a new CEO who focused on customer care, training employees so they knew what they were doing. I rose through the ranks to a full repair agent where I did repairs proudly.
About 6 years ago the board ousted the last CEO for not making enough profits. The new one essentially reversed everything overnight. Less training, lower wages, less employees. It shows every time I’m in a best buy and it kills me. We had something special then, but new CEO doesn’t care. Line must go up, and torpedoed all of that consumer trust. Now I don’t recommend anyone buy anything from best buy.
I had to buy a laptop 2 years ago and was eyeing a laptop, and a sales person attempted to help me. I tried to be nice, thanks but I got this, but obviously had a madatory spiel. Told them I was just going to install linux and they said “oh this won’t support that”. Okay sure, thanks for showing you don’t know anything, okay goodbye. I went from promoting geek squad warranties to now I wouldnt trust them at all.
Your story about buying a laptop reminds me of a scene from Parks and Rec when Ron Swanson’s picking up supplies for a project at a home improvement store.
It is, but more because they (employees as a whole) used to know, but now they just kind of “read the cards” that are in front of them. Not their fault, corporate killed all of the training
This why I shop at my local Ace Hardware. They actually know their shit there. It’s worth a little extra markup - plus, the money’s mostly staying in the neighborhood.
100% true. When I visit my parents, Home Depot is like the Best Buy of home stuff. No one knows shit, no one cares. Ace is where you go to have someone take a minute longer to give you real info. It’s like some secret third space where if they served coffee or beer, people would spend half their day there.
I’m so happy my grandparents bought their laptops from the local computer store.
They’re marking everything up, pretty wildly, but damn do they offer support.
And they also pushed FOSS on them, through libre office rather than the insane Microsoft office subscriptions the big chains try to push on their customers
Plus the ace cashier will be a friendly face when you’re back in the store for the 4th time that day, after being sure you bought all needed components of your project during your first trip
Stop following me around.
I bet if you find a local hardware store they’ll be a lot more knowledgeable and 100% stays local.
Almost all of Ace’s locations are independently owned. If there were an unaffiliated store anywhere in my vicinity, I’d certainly go there, but this neighborhood business literally two blocks from my home is hard to beat.
They’re franchises. The lion’s share of income goes to the HQ, like any franchise.
No ongoing franchise fees.
https://www.myace.com/open-an-ace/
There are fees for using other Ace franchise services, but that’s far from the “lions share.”
Man am I glad to hear that. I just got a weed trimmer there and wasn’t sure I made the right choice.
I’ve always had that same experience with Ace in my area. The people there actually know their departments and can help with relevant questions. I try to go there whenever possible over Home Depot or Lowe’s because of it.
Or when Hank Hill has to go to Mega-Lo-Mart for propane
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I was BestBuy services when they bought Geek Squad circa 2004. We went from “keep the customers happy by actually solving their problem so they come back and buy more” to “you’re all salespeople so charge every customer $60 just to set the computer down on the counter and push magazine subscriptions”
They must’ve gone back and forth a couple of times since then.
Yup, I started at the tail end of where you ended where they realized they done fucked up again, and then rinse and repeat. Good leaders learned it’s a long term gain, that services are there to support the sales. Then they get “line go up” short term morons who kill all of that good will for a good quarter, and the stock plummets. To me you can see it clearly in their stock price:
You can see your drop down, then they realized they fucked up, then my time was around 2011-2015, you can see the collapse and rebuild. Then wit does go up during the tenure of Jolie, until he was forced out. They enjoyed short term profits and got lucky through covid, and now they’re floundering because they don’t really know how to retain customers, so it’s wildly fluctuating.
Yep. Worked there around the same time as you. I was on the appliance and TV repair side and was part of the massive layoffs. I left and focused more on my engineering career. But I saw the same thing you did. I started in '06 and left around '16. Saw the wheel spin a couple of times. My dad went there recently to buy something simple, asked for help, was told someone would be right over, and after half an hour he left and just picked it up from Walmart. They got rid of the checkout at our local store and now customer service rings people out, but when no one is around to do that… People just leave.
It’s sad to see, I don’t want less competition out there for electronics retail.
The board didn’t oust Joly 6 years ago. He chose to retire. Corie Barry was not a good CEO as his replacement.
It’s possible they actually did want to retire, but if that’s the case they almost always pick a successor that will continue along the same path.
Most of the time you see a CEO “retire”, they’re being forced out by the board and paid off with a golden parachute to not make waves on the way out. And the next CEO is installed to make whatever changes the board wants implemented that the previous CEO refused to do.
Yeah… people need to understand this as a basic way corpos and corps work.
Almost nobody ever willingly retires. Almost always, they’re forced out, and theres a PR campaign run internally and externally to make it look like they’re voluntarily retiring.
Wait, Hubert Joly is gone‽
Fuck.
I remember the Brad Anderson days.
Best Buy broke the power button on my laptop when they replaced a faulty screen and then refused to fix it for free. It took so many phone calls and emails and in-person visits to get them to take care of that shit, it was like a part-time job. In the end they framed it as “this one time we’ll make an exception and do it gratis” as if they were doing me a huge favor by addressing their own fuck up.
At the time, they very carefully crafted a mirage hidden behind carefully worded messaging and the appearance of an in-house workshop for computer repairs, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the time they were just sending the equipment out to a 3rd party repair warehouse (sometimes in another country) that clearly did not care about the quality of the work.
If you ever need to find a side hustle, just fine 1 or 2 people who geek squad has fucked over and fix their shit properly. They WILL tell everyone they know and you’ll always have drinking money.
My 20s were funded almost entirely by Best Buy’s incompetence.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m half surprised they didn’t just steal it
In a way they have stolen it, they’ve stolen the value by not replacing it. It’s highly likely the stick is faulty and would have to be replaced under warranty. The faulty stick they returned is useless and they’re trying to stiff him by not giving him a working stick that he’s entitled to.
I knew a tech that did that years ago. he had to move two states away because people kept finding him and threatening to kick his ass.
this was 30 years ago.
last I heard he became a mechanic. probably doing the same shit tbh.
I knew a tech that did that years ago.
Good thieves are the ones you don’t know about
Did they turn around and sell it at 500% mark-up?
One stick of 32GB has been removed and sent back to client with unit.
No, the stick they removed was faulty. They sent it back to the customer instead of replacing it under the warranty.
“Replacing that stick of RAM will cost more than the entire original purchase price of the laptop, so just say it’s faulty and let them figure it out. Never mind the fact that we sold them a laptop with faulty RAM.”
Best buy only kinda sold them it. It was sold by a 3rd party through them.
Get outta here with your “reading the article” and “common sense”.
I mean, personally I say if you’re allowing people to sell under your name, you are ultimately responsible for what’s being sold and should take care of the customer, then go after the people who sold under your name.
So get out of here with your “defending large companies even a tiny bit”
Worked in a computer shop before, seen some warranties like first year take to the place you bought it, 2-5 years contact manufacturer. That being the manufacturers stance on the warranty, we would still look it up and help/advise customers if possible. Like if they needed proof of purchase we would print off a receipt for them even 4 years later.
In this case Best Buy is simply acting as a marketplace for other sellers. The items aren’t sold under the Best Buy name, and it lists who the seller is. They’re sold on the Best Buy website, alongside thousands of other sellers and Best Buy directly, just like many other retailers do. Companies like eBay, Amazon, Walmart, etc. all operate marketplace storefronts that third parties use to sell to consumers without having to have their own website and sales infrastructure.
I really doubt the tech who worked on it cared how much money the replacement cost. But who knows
It’s probably not the tech making the decision. It was probably the tech attempting to request one, (because they were out of/low on stock,) and being told by management to send it back as-is instead.
Unless Best Buy is owned by Lenovo it doesn’t matter, assuming it was a warranty case. It’s the producer that covers
It’s probably changed somewhat, but it used to be that all major ram manufacturers included a lifetime warranty.
Even if they do, they will now claim they don’t have stock to replace and will refund you the original purchase price. Which is usually 25% of the current cost to replace it now.
Quite a few posts around online in recent months of this being the exact playbook they’re going by now.
Other folks have already corrected the record here, so I just wanted to say that if the RAM had been stolen and sold it would be a far higher profit margin. The employee would have probably taken at most 1 hour to realize the opportunity. The current maximum wage for an advanced tech (probably the role that did this “work”) is $21.90/hr so let’s say the labor cost of this heist is $20. Open box on eBay is $400 for a profit of 1900%
Just take a screwdriver to the Library. They always have electronic book search computers set up in dark corners these days.
It might not be sticks of 64GB DDR5, sure, but that doesn’t mean you can’t type those letters into your Ebay listing.
You can just add [toy] to the listing and send them some wood looking like a 64GB DDR5. You just sold them toy rams for their toy PC
Back in 2014 or so, I had an issue with my windows laptop, not quite sure what the issue was, but their solution was to replace the HDD with a lower RPM one with that stupid “energy saving mode” that would aggressively halt the drive occasionally. Pissed me off, my files took over 3x longer to open. Could never recommend the Geeksquad after that.
Best Buy is just 15 year olds that have zero experience. They are usually the least qualified pc repair shop in your area.
They once told me I could open and install windows and then return it if there was an issue. That was the head of their geek squad that told me this, the actual manager.
Yeah, you have to be bat shit crazy to trust Best Buy to fix anything
They disqualified me from Geek Squad because I knew how to use Linux (as well as Windows at the time but it’s been ages). They told me “we only sell Windows machines here” despite (as far as I know) they themselves using Linux to repair Windows computers.
MRI software is nothing more than a customized WinPE environment. It doesn’t suck surprisingly but nothing real special
I’m just glad I dodged that bullet. I had two friends on separate occasions say Best Buy was unable to fix their laptop and in both cases simply opening it and reseating the RAM was enough. I’m not sure what kind of morons they had working there.
