What readers' of the Pricewatch blog had to say this week...
Laptop problem doesn’t compute with Sony
AN EXASPERATED Ursula Kilkelly from Cork contacted us to complain about Sony and its inability to deal with a “seemingly ill-fated laptop” which she bought from Sony Direct in February 2009. The machine worked fine for several months but last summer it started crashing and she couldn’t get beyond the blue screen.
She spent many hours trying to solve the problem, had repair disks sent over from Sony and ran various system checks – but nothing worked.
Last August, Sony Vaio Repair replaced the hard drive which was when the machine started behaving erratically and crashed without warning. She phoned Sony in October and November but with little success. She phoned again on December 21st “when the girl who took my call recognised there was a problem immediately and proposed that DHL collect my machine for repair”.
The next day the machine was collected and on January 10th she got a call from technical support asking what the problem was as they couldn’t find any. Five days later another Sony caller concluded that a computer cable may be at fault but it had not been sent with the machine so Sony said they’d send a courier round.
This took a week to sort out. On January 27th and before Sony had tested the laptop with the potentially problematic cable, the laptop was returned to her.
On February 2nd Sony staff said they had not been able to find any fault with the machine but wanted to get it back to test it with the cable. Then DHL called to her home address even though she’d asked for it to be collected from her work address.
The laptop was collected again two days later and another week passed before she got another call from Sony asking what the problem was.
She was told the machine would have to be returned to her and if the problem reappeared “they would send it to their superior repair centre in France”. Following more confusion the unfixed laptop was returned to her but “without the cable”.
At the beginning of March, 10 weeks after she first sent the laptop to Sony, it was reunited with the cable. “Since that date I have had no further contact from Sony. My laptop continues to behave as before, if not worse, crashing internet explorer, not resuming properly, etc. I have found the whole thing absolutely infuriating and even though my machine is unreliable, I can’t bring myself to phone them again.”
We gave it a shot. On Friday morning the company issued the following statement. “We have since contacted the customer and the issue is now fully resolved. The customer has been offered a replacement laptop. We would like to emphasise that customer service is of utmost importance to Sony and we wish to take this opportunity to apologise to the customer for her unfortunate experience.”
Counting the cost of food at Dublin Airport
RECENTLY WE carried a gripe from a reader who said he had paid €9.30 for a takeaway plain ham salad panini with two sachets of mayonnaise in Dublin Airport.
This prompted a response from the airport. A spokeswoman contacted us to say there is a wide range of food choices and price points available to people in the airport. She could not comment on the cost of the sandwich our reader had bought “as he had not provided information about the outlet where he’d bought it” but she said that, having carried out a check of the prices among all the food outlets in the airport, the cost of a panini was €6.95.
She also said there is “a number of hugely competitive food offers available” including one outlet which is selling “a takeaway bowl of soup and a sandwich or roll for €3.49, while another has a meal offer that comprises a sandwich, a soft drink and a packet of crisps for €3.99”.
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