Sony. What a shower of *insert expletive*. A customer dropped in a relatively new (probably about 6/7 months old) Vaio. It had received a bit of a knock and it wasn’t booting to windows anymore, he tried repairing it himself with the built in OS restore. That aside, it semi-wiped the drive and outright failed then. Ok I’ve no problem with that, customers mistake, probably didn’t read the restore warnings, but he wasn’t too bothered about the data, just needed it up and running before leaving the country, or at least to know what can be done about it.

So anyway, I bring it home, try to boot up using windows disks to do a check disk. No joy, constant “Operating System Not Found” warning, despite setting the order of boot to cd first etc.. So fine, not working, time to take out the drive and check it. Hummm no bloody access to the hard disk! To get to the drive I had to take the entire laptop apart. What muppet in Sony designed this! What normally takes 2 mins to remove a hard drive took 20. I thought maybe they designed it this way to keep customers coming back to THEM for repairs, this is just a really bad design. No regular customer would be taking their hard drive out, so why do it?

I can’t just blame Sony for this crappy design, I’ve seen Fujitsu do it too but it was on their older models. Sony seem to be taking a cheap route in their laptop design and building. I hate badly designed goods, it couldn’t have been that more expensive to add an extra panel for easy access. At the very least it’d make it easier for their own staff to assemble, repair or customise laptops. The only reason I’m ranting about this is that Sony were the expensive, quality laptop, now they seem to be going down the Iqon route. I’ll rant about Iqon another time, actually I don’t think there’s a need. Anyone that has repaired, owned or used an Iqon laptop/pc knows how crap they are and how inept the company were.

rant rant rant

Anywho, besides me ranting about crap, I’m now older, kinda only copped it this morning, when thinking about finances for year 3 of college, may be able to get the mature student grant (if the country hasn’t melted by then).

Gonna try and keep this up to date a bit more, preemptive new year resolution. Anywho back to work and study, exams Monday, fun fun…

Ooo also blood update, got an email back eventually from IBTS.ie, the soonest I can give blood in Athlone is… January. wow

Edit/Update: I withdraw my insults about Iqon, while they’re still crap, they can’t beat HP’s wonder Pavillion DV series. Yesterday I recieved yet another DEAD Hp Pavillion Dvxxxx, I’m into the double digits of these laptops that decided to roll over and die. Main cause of the problem seems to be the Nvidia graphics chip, requiring an entire mainboard replacement. Guess what? Most of these laptops I’ve dealt with are out of warrenty and some aren’t covered by the limited add on warrenty hp offered. A total recall of these units should have been performed. I’m offer repairs on a small scale, I wonder how many hp have recieved of these? Also good luck with their tech support staff, not in warrenty, you have to call a premium rate number, then you have to pay for the mainboard replacement, despite it being a widespread fault. Way to go HP, you now take number one position on manufactuers I hate.

Laptop manufacturers listed by hate:

1: HP - For faulty hardware

2: Iqon - For no driver support / no customer support

3: Sony - Bad design

4: Fujitsu Siemens - Selling loads of cheap laptops with Celerons

5: Dell - Feckin Indian tech support, your last name isn’t Smith, it’s something with 6 syllables, don’t lie to me.

I know I do. I’m even trying to give it away, but with no luck. Numerous times I’ve tried to contact the IBTS online, all have failed. I’ve tried to locate somewhere to give blood in Athlone (fairly big town and population), the next time they’re around is January (I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a while now). They even had a text alert service, which is no longer available, it also never worked. The next thing I’m going to do is call them and see when they’re around next, surely it has to be sooner than January. The frustrating thing is, I’ve emailed them and received no response, they’ve been crying out for blood recently and yet I want to give but can’t.

What’s the deal?

They could be short staffed, fair enough, they could be having technical problems, again fair enough. But this has been going on for months now, every now and again I remember that I want to give blood, have a look, no donation areas in town, no text alerts, no email.

Just seems pointless to be asking for it, if they’re not going to collect in big areas.