lol

[quote=Jim0203]And yeah, I know laptops aren't ideal for video editing but I don't have room for a desktop in my tiny flat; plus I do quite a lot of work away from home so I need something that's portable. My old Dell (XP, 3GHz Pentium IV, Radeon 9700 graphics) was fine for video editing - just needed a big external HDD to hold all the data. My new Sony (Vista, 1.8GHz Duo, 8-series NVIDIA graphics) should be fine too, as I've gone out and bought another, even bigger external HDD. It is frustrating not being able to get into the machine myself without a struggle, but on balance it's the best option for me.[quote]

Fair one. I've not had any dealing with Sony support. They are a good company so I was quite suprised when you were originally talking weeks. Dell and HP are the same during the warranty period of any laptop or device, they are normally out the next day. At least you'll be sure to have a nice working laptop in the next week or so, but be sure to come back and let us know that everything went OK, and if you are able to install Windows without any further issues?

I was getting the figure of four weeks from the Laptops Direct website, so was very pleased when Sony told me it should only take a few days. I'm guessing it will come back to me with Windows installed as it was when I first got it, but I'll make sure to come back and let you know!

Only complaint so far is that Sony originally told me I would only need to give the laptop over to DHL; I then got an email from DHL telling me to print out a couple of bits of paper and give them to their courier. Not a huge problem in itself, but I'm away for the next week so had left the laptop for collection with a friend over on the other side of Edinburgh. I emailed the DHL forms to her but she doesn't have a printer, so I had to trip out their again! Hopefully all is sorted now...

Hehe, this is almost a blog now Jim I will be watching to see how this one turns out...

Lucky you found a PC to print them out, otherwise you would have been stuffed. Would be an interesting way for Sony to get out of repairing that laptop. Arrange to send your laptop away for repair, but wait.. you can't because the laptop isn't working in the first place!!

Well, it turned out that I didn't need to print out the things for DHL after all (which kind of makes sense really, since it would mean them asuming I had a printer and a second laptop! Although they did ask me to print them out).

So here's what's happened since my last post:

The laptop gets picked up fine by DHL on the Thursday.

I get a text message from Sony saying they've receive the laptop on Monday, and that most repairs take around 5 working days to complete. I was originally told that I would be without my laptop for 5 days, including transport time, but let's let this one go.

I call Sony for an update on Tuesday to see if there's any more news. I'm told that someone looked at my laptop on Monday but couldn't diagnose the problem, so someone else is looking at it.

I call on Wednesday, and there's no more news.

I call on Thursday, and there's no more news. The girl I spoke to "escalates" the repair and says she'll call me back. She doesn't.

I call again on Friday, and am told that the girl I had spoken to had called the repair centre but they didn't call her back, and that someone had called the repair centre again at 3pm on Friday, but had got no more news. Worryingly, the girl I spoke to said that "sometimes at the repair centre they don't log all the work they do as it progresses and just log it all in one go". And since it's a bank holiday on Monday, I won't get any more news until Tuesday at the earliest.

Now, I can accept that things sometimes take longer to fix than at first thought. I can accept that parts might take a while to arrive. But it really p*sses me off when people don't communicate what's going on! I'm not going to get angry with the people I speak to, as they're just working for a living and they've all been helpful and perfectly pleasant so far, but since I can't get through to the engineers myself I'm a bit stuck!

The worst bit of this IMHO is how expected it was; it seems that no big companies these days are really bothered with actually sorting things out, and it means their customers end up wasting a huge amount of time chasing them up (for example, my girlfriend recently tried to set up a direct debit for her mobile phone (provided by Three) and they kept sending her bills with charges on them for not setting up a direct debit. It was only after calling Three four times, probably over an hour total time, that someone told her the account she was trying to set up the direct debit on could not do direct debits. That's fine; she's got other accounts that can; but why didn't they just tell her?!?!?).

I'll report back more next week, but for the moment Sony are not behaving as well as I would expect of them.

unfortunate... please do keep us posted.
Sometimes it's just lack of communication-- but big corps can "lose you in the shuffle" sometimes