Does SONY save money on service in order to increase the revenues during an economic recession?

Mihaita — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:09:25 GMT

Hi,
Sony-Service in The Netherlands shows that SONY doesn't care of us, despite using business-class laptops assured with "on-site" guarantee pack, as you'll see in my recent experience I have (still not solved) described below.

On 2nd December 2008 I claimed a failure on the FAN of my VGN-SZ4 laptop. After one week, on 9th December2008, a mechanic came to fix it, and he broke the hard-drive flatband while working brutal and fast that he lost 2 screws down!
(the description of the failures are also shown by the report of the service subcontractor and attached here).
Next, after several calls in the begining of the year, and while I was writing a first post about sony-service (available here ), I received the repaired laptop on 21st January.
Unfortunately, another problem arised: the laptop turn-off by itself while you work on it!
After I reseted to the factory-default settings by using recovery, I have a fresh VISTA without any personal software on it, and if you do the "benchmark" to find out the rating index, the laptop turns off any time you try it!
You can see it in this movie: http://www.cristomatics.eu/papers/SONY_VGN_SZ4_failure.mov.

After many calls, discussions where I never got a supervisor on the phone, just an Alex trying to listen to my claim and my frustration without doing anything real, I am nowadays still waiting for a week to get a pickup box via DHL to send my laptop to a repair-centre (from The Netherlands to Belgium). For those interested to check my service claim, look at CaseRef.3551735.

Honestly, I don't believe in SONY anymore. Do you think that Apple, or Dell would let a customer for more than 2 months without laptop? I have colleagues at the University of Amsterdam telling me that they never had such bad reaction from the service of Apple/Dell, though there could be problems anytime. Nonetheless, University paid for a business laptop for me, a research scientist, including the best "on-site" guarantee pack.

Despite the good products SONY releases, I would think twice when I have to pay such a high rate on a brand (with lack of guarantee support) for a product that might be available to other good brands.
I am curious if this story applies to other countries than The Netherlands. Is anybody else un-satisfied by the SONY service, recently?

Kind regards,
Mihai

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Does SONY save money on service in order to increase the revenues during an economic recession?