Computers near Goleta, CA

“Bought a washing machine for my business. On sale, good price, well-rated. Delivered as promised. Made an annoying noise. Geek Squad listened and suggested replacement. Replacement came in two days! Same noise. Traded for better rated model. Same noise, but service was great!”

“Went to inquire about Geek Squad installation of a mesh network. I had no appointment but only had to wait about 5 minutes. Got good information about calling in my request. Wandered into the TV department and a young man was very gracious and spent a lot of time explaining the differences in many TVs. Spent at least 15 minutes with us. Prices are at least as good as Costco. Best Buy is doing things right!”

“Yelp tells me it's National Library Week, so here's an updated version of my review of the UCSB Library, a truly wonderful resource. I wrote the original last year when we were still in the midst of a terrible drought. We got a lot of rain this last winter, but nothing like the storm I describe below. Back in the 90s I was a grad student at UCSB and had the privilege of doing research in this library. It's an outstanding resource and staffed with an incredibly knowledgeable and helpful staff. Five stars all damn day! Also back in the 90s here in Southern California we used to have wet winters. Hardly ever rains in these parts anymore. This story took place in 1994, in the middle of an absolutely epic rainstorm. The wind was so strong that huge decades-old eucalyptus trees were blown down all around campus. Roads running through the campus were blocked with these fallen behemoths. The rain was coming down in torrents. It was a full on El Nino type storm event. I had spent the morning doing research and left the Library a little after noon to walk to my apartment about a half mile away I was wearing my trusty REI raincoat. It has a huge hood that completely covers my head and has a bill that extends out to cover the top part of my face. With the hood on and bill pulled down you can keep your face dry but your forward vision is limited to the area just in front of your feet. I was on the path that led back to family student housing, with a backpack loaded with like 15 pounds of books I had just checked out. The wind was blowing so hard it made the rain look like it was falling sideways. I was walking into the wind as fast as I possibly could, staring at the ground and only peeking out from under my hood occasionally to make sure I wasn't about to run into anything. Since it was raining so hard, and had been for hours, the path was virtually deserted. Every time I peeked out from under my hood there wasn't anyone else on the path. I kept my head down and pushed on into the driving rain. Then the damnedest thing happened. I looked up and saw Professor Steven Hawking no more than five feet away, speeding directly toward me in his wheelchair. We were just seconds away from a head on collision. At the absolute last possible moment I jumped to the right, out of his way. He motored full speed right by me. Missed me by mere inches. It happened so fast there wasn't time to process the situation. I stood there in the pouring rain and watched him roll away. I couldn't move my feet. I was shaking with adrenaline. WTF????? I almost collided with Steven Frickin' Hawking. Now, you wouldn't know it from my profile, but I'm actually a pretty big guy. At the time I was 6'2" and weighed 220 pounds. I had a backpack with over 15 pounds of books on my back and I was walking at full speed. Steven Hawking was 5'6" and weighed about 137 pounds. And he had ALS. All the way home this loop played in my head: Oh my god, that was so close! Oh my god, if I would've hit him head on, I might have killed him . Oh my god, I almost killed Steven Hawking! In my mind's eye I could see the headlines, "World's Smartest Man killed by Village Idiot." When I got home I tried to sort it all out. I had so many questions. Like, first of all, what the hell was Steven Hawking doing in Santa Barbara? And what was he doing out in the middle of a torrential downpour with no attendants? I mean, wouldn't you assume he would have at least a caregiver or a gaggle of grad students around him pretty much all the time? Well, he didn't. He didn't even have a damn umbrella. He had to have been soaked. And then I started thinking about the moment I looked up to find him just five feet in front of me. He had to have seen me coming right at him for a long time before I noticed him, but when I looked up he was coming straight for me. The path was eight feet wide. He could have easily steered around me. But he didn't. He was coming straight at me. That was a startling reali”

“$230 to replace a HD cable. $65 for the cable itself and $140 for labor. I'm going to give these guys the benefit of the doubt and five stars because the repair seems to have been done properly, but this confirms my suspicion that Apple hardware is both overpriced and overrated and now I see that the repair is ridiculously expensive too. If you're on the fence, save yourself and get a PC. I could have bought a lovely PC-based laptop for $230 off of Craiglist, and I'm not even counting the $130 I already spent on Disk Warrior just to get the files off because Disk Utility couldn't cope with the drive. The only reason I have a Mac myself is to have one foot in the door in the Mac development world, but I've gotten increasingly disenchanted with Apple hardware over the years, and increasingly tolerant of PC-based hardware, especially if you put something like Ubuntu on it. And DIYers: you might want to fiddle with things a bit more than I did: I can't imagine not finding any HD cables on the Internet for less than $65, and I've done DIY repairs much more complex than a HD cable replacement before. I shouldn't have thrown in the towel so quickly.”