Sony redeems itself, a bit

For what seems like an eternity now, I have been struggling and struggling with Sony. I have bought a *lot* of their equipment in my lifetime, and generally speaking I have always been very impressed. However, and without going in to the gory details, recently I have been so fucked off with them that I vowed never to buy anything Sony ever again.

The short story is: I have a VAIO (Sony laptop computer) – I bought a docking station and some memory for it from SonyStyle (grr). The docking station is fine, great in fact (although overpriced). The memory didn’t work – just caused my computer to crash. Phone SS who told me it wasn’t their dept, had to phone VAIO-LINK. Did that. Have you tried this? Yes! Are you sure! Yes! Will you do it again? OK. Still didn’t work. You can imagine the situation, about 20 phone calls over the space of 3 weeks, none of the promised ringbacks (so me phoning their London number which reroutes to BELGIUM!), havign to explaing the whole fiasco to 20 different people, constantly being told it was someone elses problem, please phone them, until EVENTUALLY, I am told it is SonyStyle’s problem (i.e. the people I bought from and phoned FIRST). So I’m back on the blower with them, at about 2pm on a Friday afternoon:

“Oh I’m sorry sir, you’re outside of the 2 weeks cooling off period, so you need to speak to the supervisor, but she’s gone home. I’ll ask her to phone you on Monday”

TWO WEEKS COOLING OFF PERIOD!? YOU FUCKING MORON, THE REASON THAT TWO WEEKS HAS PASSED IS BECAUSE OF YOU, YOU CRETINOUS LITTLE ARSEWIPE. AND WHY IN THE NAME OF GOD HAS YOUR SUPERVISOR GONE HOME EARLY? ISN’T HER JOB SORT OF IN HER TITLE, TO SUPERVISE? HOW LAZY IS SHE!?

Needless to say I didn’t get that phone call Monday morning. Eventually the memory was returned to them (all i needed was a return code and for me to send it back, for crying out loud). However, I did not get a replacement. I had to pay P&P on something that was shite and I was thoroughly let down.

And I let Sony know this too. I emailed and faxed them, repeatedly. To this day, I have had no response, hence my vendetta against every buying anything Sony ever again.

However, my VAIO died quite spectacularly on Friday morning. Whilst I was all backed up, I really did not fancy the prospect of formatting and reinstalling XP Pro since it had been a fucking nightmare the first time I did it.. so reluctantly, I reached for the VAIO recovery disks, fearing for my sanity.

And this is where there is a happy twist in the tail! They actually worked brilliantly! Admittedly it installed XP Home (but shhh, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t, and let’s face it, there’s frankly bugger all difference between Home and Pro… it’s a bit like having a VW Golf instead of a Seat Arosa… it’s the same fucking car, just a different badge and one is more expensive).

And here I am, typing away… all back to normal. System is runnign fine, I’m SP’d up and it’s all good. So, well done Sony!

My simple advice is: Sony make good kit. OK the vast majority is horribly proprietry (I mean the Memory Stick… what a bag of shite) but generally, it’s top quality. Just, please, whatever you do NEVER EVER EVER USE SONYSTYLE – it’s overpriced, the delivery is shite, and the customer service is non-existent.

Please don’t use them. Please!