Serial number not recognized by Sony Support

[crazyface]

I've been wrestling with a mouse/track pad problem on my Vaio laptop (Win7, model nr. VPCSA4T9E, bought in Nov. 2012, in Denmark)  and have been trying to get some help from the Sony website, preferably an email address for customer service.

When I'm asked to enter my serial number it keeps telling me it's wrong. I've checked both my Vaio Care on the laptop in question and turned it upside down and checked the sticker - same number in both places and still it says it's wrong!

What's going on here?

[Blencogo · Accepted solution]

Hi ceazyface and welcome.

I suspect there is a temporary problem with the Sony servers.  Support is only available Monday to Friday during office hours, so I would try again on Monday.

If there is still a problem on Monday, please come back here.

[crazyface]

Hi there, thanks for the quick reply!
I'll take your advice and give it another go tomorrow morning, see how it goes.

[crazyface]

Hi again,

Serial number still not accepted by the sony support pages and I've just spent my entire lunch break on hold in their customer 'hot'line.

Any helpful suggestions to what may be causing this or how to fix it will be be extremely helpful.

[Thalamus.]

Hi Crazyface,
Welcome to the Sony User Community Forum..

I passed you comments regarding the difficulties you were having contacting support onto one of my contacts , hopefully someone from Vaio support should now contact you..

They normally use the contact details you used when you registered your Vaio so hopefully these are still correct..

If you do not hear something from Vaio support in a day or so please post again and one if us will try to find out what is happening..

[crazyface]

Hi and thanks for the welcome,

I registered my laptop on Club Vaio through a link in the Vaio Care program back when I bought the laptop in question but is that the registration you mean? Other than that I haven't registered it anywhere apart from my insurance company and this site when I wanted to post my problem. Is there a specific site where you're supposed to register? All I got from the manual and/or Sony programmes was the Club Vaio link...

[coliin]

The serial number of my new vaio pro was not recognised yesterday or still this evening. There was a complete outage of the sony uk site earlier, so maybe there is a technical problem - but the entry box is highlighted in red even before it goes to the server.

I clicked 'I don't have the serial' and entered the details of my problem but haven't had any response yet - even a confirmation email - after 24 hours. Is this usual? How long will it usually take?

Thanks,
Colin.

[coliin]

@crazyface - if you typed in your serial number then that was probably it. I got an email to confirm registration and verifying the warranty.

I have now been able to enter my serial number successfully into the support request form.

[fairplay123]

I had the same problem in mid August 2013 after I purchased a new Sony Duo 13 with 512G SSD drive, and 8g RAM, and Windows 8 Pro.

Not only would it not recognise the machine, but Sony told me that it was normal!  Aapparently cause it was a new model.  This meant that a lot of instructions on setting up the machine could not be followed.

Worst was that I could not make recovery media.

This was because Vaio software installed was not updated - and could not be since Sony did notrecongise the machine.  Inturn this stopped backup media from being created.

Note the dependencies:

1) Serial number not recongised

==> 2) Sony installed Vaio software does not function properly

====> 3) Back up recovery media cannot be made

IT WAS AWFUL and most unexpected of Sony.  I have purchased 6 Sony laptoops for the business in the last 3 years and I have done so because I expected them to take greater care in products and customer service.

Not so!

I had to spend a long time with Sony on the phone getting this issue sorted.

But there have been 100s of other problems with the machine since.

[crazyface]

@ fairplay123
I think our problems differ in that my machine is perfectly acceptable of the serial and model number, it's Sonys support/customer service website who doesn't.

The machine works fine and so does Vaio Care, except for the faulty mouse that prompted my quest to get in contact with Sony's customer service in the first place and I was able to use Vaio Care and make recovery discs etc.
Nice to know I'm not the only one who's a bit flabbergasted by the poor customer service.