The Consumerist deconstructs the appalling 'optimization' service that Best Buy has been pushing on consumers in recent weeks. The retailer charges 40 bucks to give you a slower PC and makes bizarre claims that it makes it go 200% faster. '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.," said a representative.
Courtesy of slashdot.com