SONY Has No Serial Number Mojo

So a while back Hunter's Xbox 360 did a face plant. So I called up Microsoft. Much as I hate to say a kind word about Microsoft, they checked the serial number and said, yep, your unit is under warranty.

A couple of weeks ago, I took my Macbook into the shop to get the fan fixed. The tech called back to say, by the way, your case is cracked, and that's under warranty, so I'm ordering you a new case. Because according to Apple, that unit, with that serial number, is under warranty.

A month ago, Hunter's PS3 got the Red Screen of Death. Safe Mode does not recover. So I call up SONY, and they say they are "unable to populate a date of purchase," which is SONY for, "If you don't have the receipt, it's $156."

Gee, thanks a lot, SONY. It's nice that your unit is a Blu-Ray player and has wireless, except right now it isn't and it doesn't because it is broken. And even though it's under a year old, you won't fix it, because it's a gift, and it didn't come with a receipt.

It certainly would be very easy for SONY to have a database of serial numbers and when those units shipped. They probably do have one. They just don't care enough about their consumers -- or they care too much about their repair profit centers -- to use it.

Boo SONY!

You Can't Go Back In Time, Unless You Can

I bought my dad a Time Capsule for Hanukah, and installed it, like a good son would. Wouldn't you know it, my hard drive did a face plant over the holidays. And while that would normally have been fairly catastrophic -- in the past I would have only backed up my user directory, and only just before we left. Instead I was able to put my entire user directory on Lisa's computer immediately, and I'm now erasing my hard disk with a mind to restore everything back onto that. (With a few detours for things I worked on since.) Though it's never fun to have a hard drive face plant, I lost only about half an hour's creative work.

So I highly recommend getting Mac System 10.5, if you don't have it already, and a large storage device (the Time Capsule's great because it's also a wireless router) and hooking yourself up to Time Machine.