(Photo: Mike)Īll Betty (not her real name, but a real Consumerist reader) wanted was to go to Best Buy, pick up a laptop she saw advertised in a newspaper circular, pay for it, and leave. Preoptimized computers stacked up in a Best Buy store. To find the answers to these questions, we enlisted the help of the Consumer Reports secret shoppers, the technical experts on CR’s electronics testing team, and of course, Consumerist readers themselves.
Would you pay $39.99 to improve your computer’s processor speed by 200%? What about software updates that would take you two days to perform on your own? Or how about services that take an “incomplete” computer and make it more useful? Good deals, right? Just one problem: None of these claims – made by real Best Buy sales clerks about the company’s Geek Squad optimization services – is true. In one case, an optimized laptop actually performed 32% worse than the factory model.
When the Consumer Reports engineers compared three “optimized” computers to ones with default factory settings, there was no performance improvement. We sent the Consumer Reports secret shoppers to 18 different Best Buys in 11 states, and one of our shoppers was denied the price advertised for a specific model because only pre-optimized computers were available. Thanks for reading till the end of this article.Over the past year, a number of you have been telling us that, due to “pre-optimization” of computers, it’s difficult - sometimes impossible - to walk into a Best Buy and leave with the advertised deal (in effect, you would be paying a $39.99 surcharge over the computer’s advertised price).
Reliance Jio have also managed to achieve a download speed of 420Mbps and an upload speed of 412Mbps in a conducted 5G test in Mumbai. Telecom operators have been conducting various 5G trials for a couple of months.
Airtel in a similar trial had achieved a speed of 200 Mbps throughput at a distance of over 10 km from the site. The company had used Nokia’s E-band MW (microwave) network for the trial. Vi, in November 2021, announced that it had achieved an average speed of 100Mbps in a rural area in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. The company had also recorded peak download speeds of up to 1.5Gbps in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar. In September 2021, Vodafone Idea claimed that it had achieved a peak 5G speed of 3.7Gbps during its testing in Pune, Maharashtra. Vodafone has conducted multiple 5G trials in major cities in past. During the testing, Vodafone Idea claimed that it has managed to achieve a 1.2Gbps 5G download speed on a mobile handset.īesides Bengaluru, Vi has said that it will be conducting trials on street furniture in other major cities including Bhopal, New Delhi International Airport and Kandla Port in Gujarat. that are used for testing 5G small cells. In case you do not know, s treet furniture is objects such as electric poles, bus stands, traffic lights, etc. Vodafone Idea (Vi) recently conducted a trial on the use of street furniture for Small Cells and Aerial Fiber deployment.