A week before my operation my new Sony VAIO A397XP arrived.
I was going to wait a little longer but I managed to find one for under £1200 with quite a few accessories included.
Apart from the fact I needed a new laptop for business work, the main reason for getting it before I went in to hospital was to allow me to take my 300Gig external hard drive and the laptop to hospital with me.
I have all my ‘own’ DVD’s backed up on this drive and it meant I didn’t have to watch the 8 or so channels they had on my TV in the room.
Last night I took it upstairs with me so I could right a few notes just before I went to sleep. It was working perfectly fine 5 minutes earlier but was dead as a dodo by the time I got it upstairs.
It looks like the internal power supply has failed inside since it does not work on batteries or the mains adaptor. (It might even be something as stupid as the main power switch or the one on the screen opening mechanism. Either way, its less than two weeks old and it has to be returned.
Armed with a pot of coffee I sat down to phone Sony VAIO support (which you get charged for at 0.07p per minute !), only to have an operator come on the line within 20 or so seconds.
After trying a few basic things to see if it would work she decided it was best to return it, (and trust me, there were so basic I should post them in my humor blog!!).
So they will be turning up next week with to collect it.
The only thing that got me miffed was the fact that they HAVE to have a password and username of an account on the machine or they will wipe the whole thing. No matter how many times I said, just get the thing to power up and return it and that will be good enough, she said they would just wipe it anyway.
It has a SATA drive which is easy enough to take out and replace with a test drive that has an image that they can use to test the machine. Its not a HDD failure, so I don’t see why they should have to access it anyway.
When I asked them to sign a confidentiality agreement, she said that had never heard of it before. I asked what guarantee I had of my data staying private and she couldn’t tell me the company policy. I’ll be firing off an email to Sony HQ to find out more about that one.
In future, I will set up an user account just in case it has to go back. Its not something I even considered before, as all of my previous laptops have been work laptops owned by Motorola.
Damned annoying that it hasn’t lasted more than two weeks.