She was holding a letter from Best Buy in her hand. A summary of the letter was basically, “hey, the 3 year warranty you purchased on your laptop is up in a little over a month. Do you wanna renew it?” WTF. Seriously! Neither Ann or I knew it, but we apparently purchased the 3 year extended warrany on the laptop when we purchased it 3 years ago for. Keep in mind, the extended warranty cost me $250 three years ago. The laptop cost me $2700 after tax.

The next day, I carried the beat up old beast laptop into Best Buy, plopped it down on the counter, and said, “it don’t work no more. The video card is burnt out.” The lady behind the counter looked at it and said something like, “wow, this is old. We don’t even sell this brand anymore.” She was very nice, courteous, and quick. She took all my information and said they would send it in and call me back in about 2 weeks. She also informed me that they might not be able to fix it, in which case they usually give you store credit. I thought, “yeah, right.”

One week later, Best Buy called. They told me the laptop was unserviceable, and that I should come into the store and “pick out a new laptop.” I couldn’t believe it, but I figured what the hey. So Ann and I drove to best buy. We presented our original receipt to the head of the Geek Squad and told him what the folks on the phone said. He looked up the info in their computer, smiled, and said, “all right! Go pick out a new computer.” I still couldn’t believe him, so we started asking questions.

He said that I couldn’t REALLY have store credit, because the extended warranties are actually insurance policies that go through AIG insurance. However, he said that I could go pick out any laptop I wanted as long as it didn’t exceed the original purchase price. I was hoping that I’d get actual store credit so that I could get a cheaper laptop and a flat screen tv for the bedroom as well; but I’m not complaining at this point.

I headed back to the laptops, where I was happily helped by 3 different sales people. You’d have thought that I was spending a million dollars in there instead of getting a free computer. Anyway, I discovered that the most expensive laptop that Best Buy sells is a full $500 less than what I had to spend. Yup, the baddest mutha they got is only $2000. It was a Sony Vaio. Dual Core Centrino with a 100gig Sata drive and 1 gig of memory. The 1 gig of memory is upgradeable to 2 gigs, but it only has 2 slots so the 2 gig would require me to replace the 2 512′s with 2 1gigs. The 2 1 gigs would run me another $300+ to buy. So, I headed back over to the Geek Squad guy and said, “hey, the most expensive one you got is 2 grand. Do you think you could throw in 2 1gig sticks to upgrade it to 2 gigs?” To my amazement, the guy simply said, “yeah. I can do that no problem.”

Thus, I picked out the brand new Sony Vaio with the 2 gig upgrade. I figured that they’d take the 512 that was in it for the trade, but they didn’t. They gave it to me. So, I’ve got 2 512 sticks of laptop memory if anyone can use it. I’ll give ya a good price on it ;p. Then, I figured, “fuck it.” I purchased the ultimate 3 year warranty on this bad boy. I got the warranty where I can kick this thing across the room while peeing on it, and they’ll replace it. If I could keep this up, it’d be possible to never actually buy another laptop again.

All and all, I walked out with this badboy, an extra gig of ram, and a 3 year warranty from hell for a whopping $200. I’d have to say that the $250 warranty paid for itself. Also, I have to give big props to the folks at Best buy. I had no less that 6, yep, count em’, 6 (head of the Geek Squad, a Geek Squad pleeb, 3 computer section salespeople, and a customer service girl) people waiting on me like I was a king. It was probably the best experience I’ve ever had at Best Buy.

p.s. They even took $16 off my total because I paid more tax in Illinois when I bought my laptop 3 years ago. I just couldn’t believe that!