It is incredible how good Sony is at making their customers look out for alternatives. To be honest I was quite a big fan of their products. I am taking pictures with their digital cameras, I am making phone calls with their mobiles and some months ago I decided to sell my desktop PC and switch to a Sony vaio notebook. Since that day my loyalty was fading.

First of all you don’t get any bundled driver/operating system CDs/DVDs anymore. They use a certain amount of your harddisk to store the Windows recovery there. So they take away some gigabytes from your harddisk in favour of some recovery files. Do you usually buy harddisks where the assembler decides to use a certain amount for his stuff?

Next surprise arrives right after booting the hilarious operating system (which is definitely not my preferable choice). Dozens of popups which tell you to register somewhere. Everytime I boot into Windows I get reminders of joining club Vaio. No option to deactivate this nonsense. It’s like telling Jehova’s witnesses to go away… every time you open the front door of your flat.

After installing GNU/Linux you will notice that Sony does everything to prevent the community to develop drivers. It is not like someone asking Sony to develop drivers for their hardware. It is more like the community asking “please let us develop drivers which work with your hardware for free” but they want to force us to use Windows. But hey… who needs the built in Modem and MemoryStick reader?

Today another bad thing happened. The harddrive decided to break. It is not fully broken yet and I was able to make a backup but I am sure those strange, loud noises it makes are some serious illness. I don’t blame Sony for the broken Harddisk. That happens a lot. But I blame their way of treating the customer. They disallow me (and the company where I bought the machine too) to remove the harddisk and send it in alone. Does anyone have any details on this? I am not allowed to replace the harddisk myself because the guarantee will be violated? What if I want to put in a faster harddisk with more memory?

I depend on my notebook and I cannot waste weeks waiting for replacement (as they don’t offer replacement notebooks during the repair process). It is OK for me to buy another (faster, bigger) harddisk and use that one. I don’t want to charge Sony any cent… they just shall return the old harddisk once it is fixed. Sadly the only way is to take away the whole notebook.

The helpdesk is no use either:

Helpdesk: Your harddisk is broken? Please do a system recovery.

Me: Ok. What for? I am not even using Windows.

Helpdesk: You have to do a full system recovery and see if the error occurs again then.

Me: Ok. After doing the recovery… how will this story go on?

Helpdesk: A man arrives at your place bringing a box. He will make another appointment with you to pick up the box another day with your notebook in it….

Arrrgh. How could setting up my Windows be the solution to my problem? The harddisk is physically broken and makes strange noises.

All this is enough for me. As soon as my Sony products need replacements I will switch to alternatives. There are many out there and I should have done more research before handing over my money to some weird corporation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 16:23 and is filed under diary and has 1 views. The entry is tagged with conspiracy, debate, diary, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.