August 22, 2001July 13, 2014 by Brendon J. Wilson

Fixing the Sony PCG-F290 Premature Shutdown

A while back I had a spectacularly bad customer service experience with Sony revolving around my wife’s Sony PCG-F290 laptop prematurely shutting down only a few minutes into the boot sequence. The problem of spontaneous hibernation has now been determined to be the result of a set of failing capacitors. It’s is also believed this issue is due in part to a known bug in the Intel Mobile Pentium II will cause an interrupt to be erratically fired by the temperature sensing circuitry; this interrupt causes the unit to enter a pseudo hibernation mode. The details of the bug are detailed in Intel’s Mobile Pentium II specifications, under errata B30 (page 46).

Sony finally arranged to have my laptop, and those of several other people I helped, shipped to the Fremont service center for Sony and fixed free of charge. While I have to thank them for finally recognizing the problem, I can’t help but be a little bitter about the lengths I had to go to, just to recieve some useful customer service. Any Sony VAIO users with a F2xx series laptop who experiences a “narcoleptic” computer should contact Sony to have the laptop repaired. Sony will perform this fix for you (assuming this is the case with your laptop) for $300 US. Alternatively, these guys will do it for you for about $150 (I have several positive reports regarding their success in resolving this issue).

Fix it yourself

If you’re handy with a soldering iron and not about to hand Sony any more money, the following document details how to fix the failing capacitors yourself:

Hibernation Fix for Sony PCG-Fxxx (PDF)

This document was provided by Anton Narkov, an ingenious Russian engineer. This fix has been implemented by several people with great success. However, be warned: this fix is not for the faint of heart! As noted by one of the people who implemented this fix successfully:

Brendon,

I used digikey part number P11308CT-ND. This is a 220uF 6.3V TE series cap. They were 2.253 each. The guy that wrote the writeup claimed that he could get them for 15 cents. Unless you had connections in china, I don’t think that I have ever seen them this cheap. I would expect about a dollar for the part. Digikey does offer convenience at a reasonable price.

One comment to make. I am an EE (electronics engineer) and I have lots of experience soldering and working on SMT parts. If the person does not have any experience with soldering, I do not recommend that he try it. Also, having the right equipment does help. I have a really nice metcal soldering station with appropriate tips for SMT. Although parts are big, the amount of heat from cheap soldering irons can cause trace damage.

Just something to think about.

Be warned. I accept no responsibility if this fix turns your laptop into an expensive paperweight. Well, I mean any more of an expensive paperweight than it probably already is, due to the hibernation behaviour.

Join the fight

To date I’ve received email from a number of unsatisfied Sony VAIO laptop owners who have encountered the same problems with their laptops. It currently appears there was a manufacturing defect with PCG F290’s distributed on the east coast of the United States around the September/October 1999 timeframe. In an effort to draw Sony’s attention to this obvious problem, and seek an appropriate resolution to the problem, consumers have few options; however, due to the power of the Internet, consumers are getting smarter faster than their business counterparts (for more on this see the Cluetrain Manifesto site, or buy the book) and we have the power to attack Sony’s credibility, simply by making our stories known.

If you, or someone you know has fallen victim to Sony’s pathetic customer service, or worse yet, suffered a terminal laptop failure just outside of the warranty period, I want to hear from you. Send me your story along with any supporting emails, and I’ll make all stories available on this web site; at worst, we’ll warn away other potential Sony victims, and at best we’ll receive a resolution to our concerns.

Those of you with the inclination may wish to voice your opinions directly to Sony’s National Customer Service Center Manager, Thomas Apicerno. You can reach him at his office at (239) 768-7550, or via email at Thomas.Apicerno@am.sony.com. Feel free to tell him Brendon Wilson sent you and point him to this web site.

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July 10, 2001May 12, 2012 by Brendon J. Wilson

Sony Rant

Don’t get me wrong, I like Sony. Before this incident, I’d never even had to contact Sony customer support for any Sony product I’d ever owned, and as far as I was concerned, they were one of the best consumer electronics companies in the world. But all that changed, and how. It all started innocently enough: a computer, a movie, and a change of address…

Dinner and a Movie

My wife and I had only recently returned from Ireland, and so we were still staying in a hotel while we looked for an apartment and I looked for a job. After a full day of interviews, I was in the mood for a movie, and so we decided to watch a DVD on my wife’s laptop computer; unfortunately, the computer wouldn’t recognize the DVD, due to the country region encoding on the DVD. During our stay in Ireland, I had changed the DVD drive’s region code using WinDVD, as the Sony provided DVD software wasn’t capable of changing the DVD’s RPC-2 drive country region; however, I hadn’t yet changed it back, and I didn’t have a copy of WinDVD. No problem, I thought, I’ll just see if Sony provides a utility for changing the country code. RPC-2 DVD drives store the country code in a piece of flash memory, and allow you change the country code a limited number of times (usually 5 times); after this, the drive’s country code is locked, and can’t be changed anymore.

Not only did Sony’s VAIO support site not provide a tool to change the country code, it didn’t really provided much of anything else; after searching for our model, we were presented with only two possible downloads: updates from the video driver, and the sound card. After having owned a Dell, and being able to download everything for my old laptop, this was a disappointment. This pissed me off; why would region encoding be enforced on a laptop in the first place? And if they had to enable it, why hadn’t they provided DVD software capable of changing it, like just about every other piece of DVD software I’d ever seen? Finally, why didn’t they have a tool to correct this deficiency online?

I decided to write an email to customer service at Sony, requesting a tool; at the same time I registered my disapproval of the CCA (Copyright Control Authority) and the region encoding system they had implemented on DVDs. The reply from customer service provided only an explanation of the DVD system of region encoding, something I was already well aware of, as should have been obvious from my email. In my reply to Sony, I criticized them for not providing a tool to swap the regions, citing the obvious need for a laptop to be useful in several regions; their reply thanked me for my “invaluable” input.

The problem was finally solved when I found a utility from the DVD drive manufacturer specifically designed for changing the region of the drive; when I notified Sony of this tool, again making sure they knew I was dismayed at their sorry excuse for customer support, I was informed that changing the region of the drive was not “a function that is supported”, and would “void any remaining warranty on the drive”. But this would not be the last time Sony would display a complete inability to support its products. The adventure would continue with The Narcoleptic Computer.

The Narcoleptic Computer

Shortly after the incident with the laptop’s DVD player, yet another problem with the VAIO appeared; every so often the laptop would spontaneously fall into “sleep” mode, and had to be rebooted. It finally got so bad that the computer would only complete the boot sequence before falling to “sleep” again. After a re-install of the operating system and an attempt to solve the problem by disabling the hibernation functionality in BIOS, it became apparent that the VAIO had a hardware problem. We called Sony, and received instructions to send the laptop to a service center.

A few days later, the service center contacted me at work to provide an estimate of the repair cost; I was informed that the “main board” had to be replaced at a cost of $2800 for a new board, or $900 for a refurbished board. I was informed that the computer was “pretty old”, which supposedly explained the price; when I asked why the specific faulty part couldn’t be replaced, I was told that the service center wasn’t authorized to perform those repairs.

I was tired of Sony, but decided I might as well get the refurbished board installed so that I could sell the laptop and recoup some of the original cost. Days later, the Sony service center called to inform me the refurbished board was no longer available.

At this point I was pretty mad at Sony, but it was about to get much worse. I asked for a Sony contact number in order to resolve this issue; as this was the third machine from Sony I had seen die just after its warranty expired, I suspected I would be able to get Sony to replace the board for free. I called Sony Canada, only to be informed that I would have to deal with Sony US, as that’s where the computer was purchased; the Sony US phone maze finally ended in a recorded message informing me that my computer was no longer under warranty, and I would have to pay $19.95 per incident for technical support. I didn’t want technical support; I wanted customer support.

I called Sony Canada and demanded a resolution; they informed me they would send a “critical note” to Sony US to get the issue resolved. When I hadn’t heard anything after a few days, I called again and they gave me a snailmail address for the Office of the President of Sony US. I wrote a letter, but have yet to hear any response from Sony US.

Conclusion

After all I’ve been through, one thing is certain: I will never buy another Sony product ever again. Their customer support is horrible, and their only purpose seems to be to misdirect you until you give up. My wife’s VAIO now sits in my cubicle as a paperweight; I refuse to pay the cost of repair. My advice to anyone looking to buy a laptop: buy a Dell.