Three Year Best Buy Laptop Warranty Already Paid for Itself (Despite Geek Squad's Initial Diagnosis)

I picked up my fixed laptop yesterday. I had gone without it for just over three weeks. My track record with laptops has been pretty bad. I have spent $4.8k across three laptops since 2004. I'm on my third laptop as we speak and have learned not to buy the $2k laptops any more. Instead, i'm using a $400 HP with a three year warranty that cost almost as much as the laptop. =(

Three weeks ago I was having problems with doing a successful system recovery using the original factory recovery disks. I attempted a system recovery two times because I had too much malware on my computer and the free AVG adaware program wasn't keeping my system clean.

When I dropped off my laptop, I was surprised to hear that the Best Buy warranty does not cover software problems. A software problem would have to be fixed at owners expense, regardless of the existing warranty.

I acknowledged this and turned my laptop over. All the while, I was expecting Geek Squad to discover that my laptop had "software issues." A few days later Geek Squad told me that they were unable to find any hardware issues with my computer and that I had the option to ship it anyways to their depot repair facility for a second opinion. Glad I did. Had I not done so, I would have been forced to deal with a perceived "software problem" on my own.

Best Buy's depot repair facility fixed my computer at no cost to me. The repair ticket cited the replacement of a "palm rest" at a total cost of $347.22 (covered by warranty). I'm not convinced that my "palm rest" was broken, but I'm happy nonetheless to recieve the laptop back in working condition.

I have had good luck w/ warranties dating back to 2004. Besides this repair, I have spilled soda on my other computers twice and had them fixed despite warranty limitations on liquid spill repairs.