"We are sorry. The BIOS update you performed with our tool which you downloaded from our "Support" section for your model is not a supported procedure. We will charge you for a motherboard exchange."
Left for dead
I am an owner of a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ61WN/C. It comes pre installed with Vista which I threw out in favor of Ubuntu 7.10 and a small partition left for Windows to play on. Overall the laptop actually works quite well and has built in HSDPA. Not bad, not bad! All this in a fairly lightweight package is quite the dream laptop.
"And yeah, by the way. We erased your data which we garunteed to preserve intact. And yes, removing the harddrive would void your warranty. We hope you had a satisfying service experience and welcome back!"
The problems begun quite early. Some stability issues. The operating system would randomly hang (kernel panics etc). I figured it might just have been kernel bugs or incompatabilities with Linux kernel drivers of the hardware. It was quite new hardware and fixing smaller model specific bugs could take smaller amount of time. So it was accepted behaviour.
The smaller problems grew to bigger ones. I would though not in my wildest dreams think that it would result in uncompensated loss for one month's work due to service technician errors which were later uncovered. Neither would I imagine the unprofessional impression given of how cases are handled at such a big and respected company in the laptop world.
"Ow, you wanted to talk with someone in charge? We'll tell him and he might call you back in a few weeks... if we decide to leave him a message."
First things first. Lets start at the beginning. Shall we?
Fixing time
As a profound computer nerd, what is the first thing you do when you run in to problems? You google. :-) I did google. Didn't find anything in particular. What's the second thing you would do? I checked the manufactorer's home page and noticed that the BIOS had been significantly updated. Among other things changes for brightness controll which was relevant, the brightness controls were not functioning under Linux at all.
Sony has a nice support page for exactly the specific model of laptop. All inclusive BIOS updates as drivers alike. Nice work :-)
I booted my old Windows partition and downloaded their BIOS flash tool. It was a Phoenix branded flasher. WinPhlash. All good. It verified my BIOS, shut down some service and begun flashing. After writing all the goodies it complained about a CRC error and made real ugly noices. The flash had failed and a corrupted BIOS now inhabitated my motherboard. After this it was all outwards.
The laptop would not boot any more. Blank screen. Dead. Lucky me I have a full warranty for one year. :-) Great!
Calling support
The support call was made 2007-12-03. The technician receiving my call was seemingly very helpful and professional. His work would though later on turn out leading to a huge data loss. Out of the support call I reported three problems to the technician
- Problems switching between graphics cards. Stuck on STAMINA (intel) on boot, unable to utilize my SPEED (NVidia) card. Motherboard checkup?
- Instability in the operating system. Perhaps check mainboard integrity and the memory modules for errors?
- The flashing failure. Needed a restore of the original BIOS
He agreed on that all of the three points was quite confident to ensure a motherboard replacement. As it was covered by warranty it would be very quick, smooth and free. He never mensioned any pricing. Why would he? It was a warranty case. He would even put a priority on the repair as I insisted on a swift repair.
It was very important to me that no data would be erased from the harddrive of the unit. Both I and the technician came to the conclusion that for a BIOS update or motherboard exchange the harddrive was not a relevant part for this type of repair.
Neither the less I asked how I could remove the harddrive from the laptop. Though this was not possible. You needed to remove vital screws on the laptop to be able to dismount it. And it would most likely void my warranty digging in that far.
In this moment I was disabled to take any form of backup of my drive. Some may argue that I should have done it before performing a BIOS upgrade - and yes, you are absolutely right in this matter. Now I had the options to void my warranty and pay a very high service fee or entrust them with my valued data.
The technician was very specific that he would make sure that the service center understood that no data was to be erased from the harddrive. He told me that if they would need to do this they would call me and offer me a disk image backup, for a price. But I was of course willing to pay them in order to save my data. Besides, he was very confident that the harddrive wasn't relevant for this repair anyhow.
Yet I didn't fully trust them by instinct, so I put a big A4 on the laptop lid stating (in big bold letters); "Service Order. It is of the utter importance that you DO NOT erase any information from the harddrive of this device!". I included my mobile phone number and asked them to call me if they needed to do this. Now I was quite sure that they couldn't miss it. A big note AND in the service request filled out by the technician.
Off it goes!
DHL picked the laptop up on 2007-12-04. It arrived at 2007-12-05. Repair estimation and back delivery was set (by the technician to a probability) to 2007-12-14. Sounded fair.
I called a few times in the following week to check status. All was set and 2007-12-14 could be kept for repair. All following to plan. On 2007-12-18 I called them and asked about status as the laptop was not received. Then I got a surprising response.
I was told that since I used the flash tool from their web site, which I had downloaded from the "Support" section, the exchange of motherboard was not covered by any warranty! He tried to explain how it was not the version I purchase so it was not the same product (wtf?). And BIOS upgrade procedures were not supported. I asked him were I may have read that. He just told me that it "was policy". I asked why they hadn't told me when I registered the support case? - He didn't know.
"We sent you an email last week asking for accept on the repair and payment". I had not received any e-mail. After checking it turned out that they had spelled my company name wrong and sent the mail to some obscure e-mail adress. This was even though that I had articulated the letters of the company name in the email to the support technician taking my case.
Due to their (first) mistake my repair was requeued and I had to pay for it. Though they were "kind enough" to only change half the regular fee of the replacement - It was after all "just a bad BIOS update", and they wanted to be a bit kind. I did not see this as an act of kindness. This was an obvious sign that they were unsure wether they could actually charge for this warranty-covered replacement and wanted to squeeze atleast a little bit money out of it.
After all, a mainboard for this laptop is quite expensive and reflashing a bad BIOS takes real technical skill and time! Exchanging motherboard made it easy for them, tops 30 minutes of work instead of a few hours reflashing the bad BIOS. By charging me they saved money and time. It didn't really matter that I had atleast one or two other valid error reported which would grant me on-warranty replacement of this same component.
I asked to get my company name changed, otherwise they would have sent out the repaired package to some non-existant company. They would update my e-mail and comapany name ASAP. Fine.
When I called back 2007-12-19 and tried to verify that they had changed this information as promised they had of course not done so. I asked to speak to their supervisor as I felt that the repair had taken unnessesary time and costed me unwarranted money. He would of course call me back ASAP. Probably the same day
Supervisor hunt
No supervisor called me back that day. Or the next. On 2007-12-21 I called telling them that the supervisor had not yet called me back. The technician (pretended?) to go speak with him directly and gave me a promise that he would call me back on the following monday (yes, 2007-12-24, christmas? was very confusing to me but I accepted).
Noone called me on Christmas (surprise :-)). On the 27th I started work again and called them back asking why he had not called me - guess what? He didn't know :). Surprising how many at their technical center can know so little.
The laptop arrived at 2007-12-28. They had not changed the company name in the return adress. The DHL guy may have signed it off to some other dude because the company name specified (due to their misstake) did not exist on the adress. Anyhow, it booted up fine. My A4 letter on the lid was still there ("Do not erase my data or I will kill you"-bigbold-text-note). They couldn't have missed it and had most likely done a terrific job. But WAIT a second. It booted Windows Vista?! German edition.
They had ERASED MY HARDDRIVE which was clearly expressed not wished. I had a promise that they should call me before they did anything like this! It was factory reinstalled with Windows AIDS.. um. VISTA Business Edition.
Now I was really upset. I know I should have made my backups more regulary. But it was a fact that I had lost about 1-3 weeks of work. Some things which I hadn't taken backup of were as old as one month. And the lack of backup routines was not a defense for them to go against the service request order which I was promised that it should be followed.
The fact that something like this can be even remotely accepted is for me a surprise. Sony is a grown up company. They should be able to fulfill this. The technician which took my original case had ensured me that this wouldn't happen. He said that they may charge you for data backup, but this was all acceptable for me. I would have paid them money to keep my data.
I called the Vaio support on the following dates asking for the supervisor to discuss my case:
- 2007-12-27 (to discuss delays in the repair)
- 2007-12-28 (promised to call me this day or early next week)
- 2008-01-02 (would probably not take longer than this day)
- 2008-01-03 (promised that they had escilated this to ensure that he called back immediatly)
- 2008-01-04 (Early next week)
- 2008-01-07 (Would call me ASAP!)
- I was sick between 2008-01-08 - 2008-01-10, yet noone called me
On the contact at 2007-12-27 I asked how something how this could happen? What had gone wrong? Could he tell me? It then turned out that the guy taking my service request had filled out their repair form wrong. The data options were actually filled in to the wrong field and never reached the repair guys in France. How they missed my big A4 letter on the laptop is though still a big surprise for me.
The acceptance level for mistakes like these are below 0 for a professional service center. The service technician said that "we are not responsible for data loss". But hey, in this case you are. Otherwise you shouldn't promise this to customers!
It is not my fault that your technicians are incompetent of knowing internal procedures. If he would have told me that the disc would be wiped I would have removed it and risked my so much valued warranty. Which by the way was not valid anyhow due to the new "flash BIOS" policy - which he also didn't know about.
2007-01-11
This date was a day of (somewhat) breakthrough. After explaining that I had been trying to reach the supervisor since almost a month back (2007-12-19) and that it started to become quite an embarrassing situation for them, the technician which took my call felt a bit guilty. He put me on hold and (actually) went to speak with the supervisor. He guaranteed me that he would call me back after making just one other customer call.
Later on this day I got a call from their supervisor! I presented my support case as in the occuring order. All from taking down correct contact information leading to a delay of my repair, the loss of work to voiding my warranty from using my support tool.
From my call to him I got the information that he had never heard about my case before!. Noone had told him anything. He had never been requested to call me before!
Again, it's miserable to see a big organisation giving out random promises which was never kept.
After hearing me out he promised me to get back to me the same day. Or possibly on Monday. He actually called me back later on this afternoon and apologized and issued a full repair refund.
Victory?
Barely a victory. I just got back the money which I was required to pay in a forced situation. It's not like I could have rejected the payment. Then my laptop would have been beyond any use. And it was in their hands, so time had already been spent on shipment etc.
Neither did I get my data back. It's lost in cyber space. Blame my backup routines if you'd like, that's fair. But that does not make what they did right.
I knew I had two valid claim cases for a replacement of motherboard without fee on the warranty already besides the BIOS flash. The graphics card switching worked fine, and the operating system has yet not crashed, nothing has segfaulted and no kernel panics. This shows that there was actually something wrong with the old motherboard - which was the only thing replaced.
Of course they deny charging for time which is spent by me recovering my work and data. So, instead of recovering it I spend my time on the internet doing the only thing I can do - Spending $12 on a domain and time to write this story. So that someone else may in fact read it and take part in this service. Hopefully someone will learn something from it. Sharing my anger with the community.
You may contact me at vaio [at] sonyservice.org