The Vicious Circle: It all comes back

I committed a sin two years ago.

I had purchased a Sony product - a laptop and that too with M$ Vista. It was for my little brother. I knew Sony couldn't be relied upon, my CD writer from sony had stopped working years ago, but still I went ahead and made the purchase. And don't even get me started about Vista!

It's all coming back now.

The laptop has performed poorly. Throwing a mere 1 GB RAM to a behemoth named Vista was like offering a gaping pig to a ravaging tornado - it can only result in destruction. And no you could not reinstall it with Win XP because several of the hardware features (like touchpad, wireless) would no more work. Why? Sony hasn't bothered to make drivers for XP (aka M$ did not want it so).

And when I say that the laptop had Vista in it, I mean it literally. It did not come with a Vista CD, it never does. All it comes with is a partition with a Vista recovery disk on it. There's a funny key-combination to activate this recovery upon boot, and can be figured out only by serendipity (the laptop didn't come with a manual either).

Anyway, after less than a year's use, Sony timer kicked in. The battery started dissipating in minutes and transitioned to a situation where it could not work at all without AC power. A Japaenese friend had told me earlier about the Sony timer - the law stating that all Sony products expire when their warranty expires. Now that I think of it, that's exactly what happened to my CD writer too.

Moving forward with life, I'm trying to purchase a replacement battery from the Sony store. Bear with me while I tell you that it costs $192.34 (excluding shipping, I think). This is about one-fourth the cost of the laptop itself. A quick Google Search tells me that equivalent batteries are available for much cheaper elsewhere.

So, to hell with Sony. I'm not going to buy anything with "Sony" on it. This includes the playstation.

Damn you, Sony! Die. Go to hell and die. May the economic recession shut you down!