Help Help HELP

[itgirl]

I have a 3 month old FR415M which for the last 8 weeks has been rebooting itself intermittently. I spent every day last eek on the phone talking to Sony Analysts and following all of their instructions for diagnostic tests to ascertain the cause of this problem. Finally on Friday they decided that I need a new hard drive and the laptop would be collected between the hours of 9 & 5 on Tuesday and the turn around for this repair would be 7 to 10 days. I waited in all day and non one came. I phoned the Analists again and they said that someone would definitely come. So far THEY HAVEN'T!!! As I could only manage to phone back again this evening imagine my disappointment to discover that I am out of office hours. No problem, I thought, I will email them - NO CHANCE!!! - despite having thier assurance that I would be able to do that as they have me registered - the website claims it has necver heard of me!! I am at my wits end - I cant get any sense out of them - their support is abysmal - I have lsot a lot of valuable time last week doing all the diagnostic checks - I have a laptop still sitting here that keeps rebboting itself and no idea when (if ever ) nayone is going to come and collect it and quite frankly I think the least they can do is give me a new laptop. Do any people who work for Sony ever read these posts and if they do do they ever do anything about the problems sited. i would never recommoend anyone to buy a sony laptop - as the support mechanism is non- existent!!! It certainly belies trades decsription in anyones book. Anyone got any helpful and consoling suggestions.

[grahambird80]

I dont work for sony firstly.

I do how ever work for a computer sales department that sell sony computer.

Who did you get the computer from, if it was a sony 3rd party retailer take it to them and get them to sort it as its in its first year and not very old.

I have delt with many calls to sony about repairs over the years and over all must say that i normaly dont get many problems from them.

I would say that you might get this problem with any computer manufacture.

If you got it direct from sony call them back. I know how very frustrating for you, but i would say call them again and dont get to angry with the person that you speak to. They probabuly were not the person that has quite obviously messed it up for you. I would also suggest calling first thing so that you dont have to wait in line for to long.

Do explain what has happened to you let them know that you have had to waste your time. Suggest the idea of a new computer instead of a repair. They might go for it, they might not.

But sony do make some of the best computers on the market.

[neildo]

itgirl,

sorry to hear of your woes.

From my experience in the industry, these support analysts are reading from scripts and don't/rarely think for themselves... quite evident in your experiences it would seem.

Anyway, I wouldn't rush to swap out the hard drive just yet. If you can, get a hold of a bootable CDrom that contains an OS... a Linux distro that runs purely from the cd. The idea here is that it will attempt to run your computer in a similar fashion to windows but takes the reliance of the hard drive out of the equation. If then you still get reboots then the problem lies elsewhere.

If things behave whilst running a cdrom bootable os, you could try the disaster recovery cd???? but, in case you didn't know - using the disaster recovery option wipes anything that exists on the HD - save your valuable data elsewhere first.

Hope this helps.

Neildo.