I cannot hold back any longer: DO NOT BUY A SONY VAIO

Seriously. You will experience less pain if you pluck a fork from your cutlery drawer, heat it in the oven until it is very, very hot, dip it in jalapeno juice and then repeatedly poke yourself in the eye with it.

Last April, I bought a Sony Vaio notebook computer--the SZ440--that cost multiple thousands of dollars. I invested in portability and souped-up speed and memory so I would have a computer that travels well and would hold up under my frequent use.

Here's what I got instead:

• 10 months into my ownership of the computer, it experienced a sudden, completely unwarned, total hard drive meltdown (approximate time on phone with Sony about this: 4.2 hours)
  
• An onsite tech replaced the hard drive, but the data is still unrecoverable from the original hard drive
  
• just under 12 months into my ownership of the computer, the fan became freakishly loud and stopped cooling the computer (approximate time on phone with Sony about this: 1.2 hours)
• The onsite tech sent to repair the fan managed to somehow burn out the hard drive while repairing the fan, and was so incompetent he wasn't even able to reassemble the notebook without pieces bulging out of the back (approximate time on phone with Sony about this: 3.8 hours)
• Sony then insisted I send the computer to them for repair--they installed another new hard drive and, presumably, a fan, then sent the lemon back to me
• Less than 2 months after that repair, my laptop experienced its third hard drive meltdown
• Sony refused to permit onsite repair and insisted I send the laptop back to them--I wanted an exchange, but they said there was no way they would exchange it, so we wrangled over that topic for quite some time (approximate time on phone with Sony about this: 2.2 hours)
• I returned the laptop to Sony and--miraculously--they proclaimed after 2 days that they would exchange it for an SZ680. However, they have had my old Vaio for 10 days and haven't ordered the exchange computer, haven't shipped the exchange computer, haven't provided me with its specs, as I have repeatedly requested, and have not returned to me the hard drive from my old computer (so I can try to retrieve data from it, including the photographs of my mother's first major league baseball game and first trip to Wrigley Field) or provided me with any information on when I will receive it (approximate time on phone with Sony about this so far: 1.9 hours)

The lesson?

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