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.

So haven’t posted in a while mainly because I’m busy, busy, busy, busy …….. *stares at wall*, and easily distracted. I’ve a ton of semi-ready posts, but they require a lot of editing before posting, so I’m gonna hold off on ‘em. However, the gist of some of them are; a load of friends are leaving the country, so I’ve been busy catching up with them, there will be drinking and on top of it all I have a job and college to attend (neither are fun when hungover). So essentially I’m chasing my own shadow which it seems is 20 steps ahead of me, wish I had his organizational skill.

Work over the next while will probably take up a lot of time, lots of ideas to implement and projects to chase up on, there’ll probably be a post on that too, as soon as I get my arse in gear. I need to not need sleep. So in conclusion members of the internets, I’m not dead, just sleeping.

I’m back was away for a few days and in general just avoiding being online as much as possible. So frig all going on, back to college in September looking forward to that, well except for the crazy ass fees I’ve got to pay, over 3k

Word of advice, if you’re gonna drop out of college do it in first year, before the year’s over
I originally started college doing a Computing course, a Degree in Computing to be exact, course title changed twice while I was at it. Turned out to be too much business for my liking, I hate business, in the sense of that’s where I’d be heading. I’d like the option to specialise in hardware or software, but not just with business as my target area. I’d be finished college by now if I’d stuck at it, could be working in “business”, feck that. I want to be working with hardware, programming, fixing stuff, not be stuck in a help desk role for all my life, “your spreadsheet isn’t working?”, that in my head is where “business” gets you with computers.

Anywho this turned into a bit of a rant for no real reason. Ah well, all good then

Edit: Just got my form in for my college fees, turns out I made a mistake somewhere, it’s only costing me 2500 instead of over 3k, not as bad