Sony support doesn’t suck, but having experienced it for the first time, I have to say it’s not as good as Dell’s. It started almost 3 years ago, in the fall of 2005, when I bought a new Sony Vaio FS-790 laptop, and this service plan:

Product: 4 Year Onsite Service Plan plus Accidental Damage Protection for Notebooks
Total Price: $ 439.99

From then till know I’ve had a great, portable, machine with a great screen and decent specs. But, last Friday, after putting the Vaio into standby mode, it just wouldn’t turn on. I noticed that:

• removing RAM from the primary slot would let it boot
• … but the LCD backlight wouldn’t turn on
• … and putting in the battery shut it down immediately

To me, when one RAM slot fails for memory you know is good, it screams a motherboard issue, so I called the Sony support line. That was where I ran into my first hitch, with a conversation like:

Sony: Can we have you service contract id number?
Me: Yes, but I don’t have it, can you look it up?
Sony: Tell us your phone number?
Me: Tells them my current and previous number.
Sony: We can’t find it!!!!!?!?

This went on for about 5 calls spread over two days, until someone was helpful enough to actually find it. I’m not sure what she did differently, since she asked and got from me the same information I’d been giving out previously, but I finally had my service contract number. I was forwarded to Level 2 tech support, put on hold for 20 minutes, and asked about my symptoms, which I described as above. The tech said he’d replace the motherboard and LCD backlight inverter and schedule me to talk to the onsite guy. Three days later, I get a call from the onsite technician, and schedule the appointment for two days hence.

When the technician arrived, he first assessed the state of the laptop, verified that the problems I had been experiencing could be reproduced, and then slowly–over the course of two hours–took the laptop apart and replaced the motherboard and inverter.

The monitor got prints all over it from the Sony repairs

I can live with fingerprints. I cleaned them off, and put in a live CD memory test to make sure the RAM really was ok. Two hours later I come back and see that my RAM passed all the tests (and that my L1 cache runs at 25Gb/s), and noticed that the laptop was extremely hot everywhere, and that the fan wasn’t blowing. Want to guess why?

The fan assembly, lying on the motherboard

Can you see it? Let me help:

Yeah, the fan wasn’t plugged into the motherboard. I had to take out all the screws on the back of it again, just to connect that one little missing bit. To Sony’s credit, their technician, if not meticulous and brilliant, was good-natured and careful. On the other hand, my previous experience with Dell stacks up just a little bit better:

	Sony	Dell
SLA	1 week	1 Day
Cost	$439	$329
Model	Send someone to do it	Send you parts to DIY
Chance of Failure	Low	High
Support rating	Low	High

I am happy with Sony; it took a week, but they fixed my notebook. But, they’re just providing what they have to. They’re not actually trying to get a fast, responsive, integrated support experience like Apple or Dell gives. The fact that they outsource their warranties to divers numbers of third party companies is evidence of that. If I had to do the notebook thing again, I would probably be going with Apple, both for their support and for the quality of the macbook line.

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