>So, you had a base objective measure, so why did you say that you could only measure it if you had a clean computer? You could install a fresh hard drive, boot

>So, you had a base objective measure, so why did you say that you could only measure it if you had a clean computer? You could install a fresh hard drive, boot into a PE and demonstrate to the customer its not slow, etc, so many things. Because I didn't realize when you said "You could have ran benchmarks, found a machine with identical hardware, etc." That you were talking about 2 separate things. I thought you were saying I could have ran benchmarks on this computer and compared to the benchmarks on an identical computer. >I am not trying to be a dick, but it seems more like the story was contrived to give your analogy some armor. There was no one single story. I saw plenty of cases like that. The contrived part was that they came in 30 times--that was exaggerated to match the number of cases in the original post. The kind of people who bring their computers into Geek Squad general don't care about objective measurement. They care about their subjective experience of whether this computer feels fast or not. Sometimes it feels slower than it did when it was new for a real reason that isn't fixable--the OS was upgraded and some of the interactions feel slower even though the synthetic benchmarks are the same. The software they are running now has been bloated over the last 5 years by new features etc... Sometimes it's some weird combination of stuff that you're never going to see unless you sit and watch them for a whole day. Sometimes it's stuff they'd never do while you're watching like opening 10 different porn videos at a time. But the point is it's an analogy. It doesn't matter if it actually happened or not. It's designed to make a comparison to the original problem but in a domain that more people here will have had experience with--diagnosing computer problems vs being a doctor.