A good friend of my husband works for the geek squad. He is actually very knowledgeable, but a lot of them just run a diagnostic program, and if they don't find anything they say it's "fixed" or replace a random piece of hardware. Sounds like they don't know what they're doing so they are calling it user error. If you just want to do basic functions (aka none of the big PC games), you can get a good laptop for around or a little more than $300. Good luck!