Remember when "design" meant "reliable"
Dennis Rockstroh of ActionLine in the Merc attempted to handle the frustration of a Sony Vaio user recently. Turns out the poor man continually had the power just blit out on him while working on his laptop. Back and forth to the factory it went, never seeming to get any better. Dennis helped the gentleman get a replacement laptop from the factory, but no one seemed to understand why such a problem was occurring and why it required a complete replacement to rectify. Sony didn't wish to discuss it, and the frustrated user couldn't figure it out other than noticing that wiggling the power connector sometimes worked.
How do I know this? Because I bought a Vaio PCG-FX-310 for my husband a few years back, and soon after acquiring it, the power connector began to fail. But since I've been putting together systems since the days of Symmetric Computer Systems, plus all that work on 386BSD and X86 systems from lunchboxes to desktops to laptops, we didn't just sit around griping about the problem - we tried to figure out exactly why this happens - both as a good little example of the importance of design in a consumer product, and as an illustration of the difference between American and Japanese audiences.
So we did the obvious - we took the laptop apart. And we found out why the factory sent back a different laptop - it turns out that this flaw cannot be repaired. It is basic to the design.
I have a Vaio Z-505 in a titanium case, and it has a very sturdy connector mechanism for the power. But in the later designs, to save costs, Sony left out the anchoring plastic on the edge of the previously all-metal case, so the connector has all of it's mechanical force transferred to the soldered-on printed circuit board connections, which are less than 1/10th of an inch of solid metal (not stranded wire). If you took a 10 gauge solid copper wire (which in effect it is) and bent it back and forth, you would only have to flex it 20 or 30 times before it broke.
In ordinary use, the laptop gets flexed more times than this in a day. So it is no wonder this is the weak spot in the design.
It is the same connector as the Z-505, by the way, as we can switch power connectors between them. The difference is that one is an example of well-engineered design (the Z-505), and the other (the PCG-FX-310) is an example of poorly engineered design. So Sony can do a good job, and they are fully aware of this problem. It couldn't possibly have been unexpected.
On the Z-505 the connector is on the side and a plastic insert holds it into position so it cannot flex as much. In addition, the connector is attached more securely to the printed circuit board, and the force is not directly on the metal to printed circuit board point, so it lasts much longer. I'm writing on one now. The Z-505 was a premium subcompact laptop. The FX-310 is an economy model, and apparently they took far less care.
How could this design have been improved to avoid this problem? Either they needed to make the connection to the printed circuit board more flexible, or they needed to restrict the connector by taking the force in the bezel that surrounds the connector. But this wasn't done.
So anyone who has one of these laptops is in trouble. It would take a complete redesign. It is a fundamental flaw.
"OK" you may ask, "I've got one of these laptops, and I can't seem to get it repaired but I need to use it - what do you do?" Well, I wouldn't recommend this and don't try this at home but you can either 1) rebuild it and fix the problem until the next time it flexes and breaks and then rebuild it again, or 2) use a heavy object like a disc drive to wedge the power connector in place - but it is still very tricky for the latter case. Sometimes we just have to take it apart, resolder, and put it back together. Since my husband uses it for his presentations, he just can't take the time to send it off to Sony's repair center (in Fremont, by the way) only to be told it's fixed when we know it can't be fixed - only cudgeled back together, as happened with ActionLine's upset customer.
I'm back to looking at the IBM Thinkpads again for business purposes, but the BIOS issues are annoying. Perhaps a technical column on the hazards of commodity products? Other than this issue, the Vaio is quite efficient - and I like Sony's fine graphics capability.
It's ridiculous that Sony should lose customer good faith because of a 2 cent part. But that's why you do quality control.
Now what would a Japanese customer expect from Sony? A Japanese executive my husband knows did manage to break a Z-505 (he dropped it) and it did require repair. So you can break a Z-505. But once the repair was completed, the computer worked perfectly. This demonstrates that design, not indeosyncratic "lemons", is the key here.
No Japanese customer would have tolerated this problem in the FX-310 - only Americans would. And Sony would never sell such to a Japanese audience - it would be unacceptable, as would the 3 times repair that Dennis's poor customer endured.