Best Buy’s Computer Optimization is Useless! Useless, I Tell You!
These days, every retailer tries to “upsell” you on something: warranties, accessories, collector’s editions, etc. One of the classic upsells is Best Buy’s $40 “computer optimization.” Theoretically, this optimization process speeds up your computer with some software tricks that Best Buy’s trained professionals perform for you, so you computer-illiterate saps don’t have to. Well, here’s the short version of this story: it doesn’t work. In fact, Best Buy’s optimization process can actually make your computer slower.
Watchdog site The Consumerist bought three optimized laptops at Best Buy and compared them to the factory default software installations:
We ran the 3DMark 2003 graphics benchmark on each laptop, comparing optimized and non-optimized settings. For two of our samples, the Gateway and Toshiba, performance changes were negligible. On the Asus laptop, however, optimized tests actually scored about 32% worse than the non-optimized setup. We have been unable to isolate the source of this performance change. On none of the three tested laptops did the optimized settings give a performance boost in our test.
The full article, which explains their methodology and how to best optimize a computer yourself can be found here.
