Sony’s “Free eSupport” is Really To Scare You Into Paying Them Money
My Sony Vaio laptop has a touchpad that lets you control the mouse position. There are two nice buttons on it to do click-left and click-right. Unfortunately, if you touch the touchpad, even very lightly, it does a click-left. More unfotunately, I seem to do this fairly frequently when I am touch-typing at high speed. I’m still not precisely sure why, but I don’t care.
I want to disable the touch-the-touchpad features.
I looked all over for some way to control the touchpad, with no luck. I tried downloading software from Sony that might have such a thing; no luck.
So I tried Sony eSupport. My computer is not under warantee, but they say you can have 15 free minutes. I asked to go into a chat session, and got into one very promptly.
It took a long while, but I finally got an answer: because I upgraded to Windows 7, there is no way to fix the problem. I said, OK, just show me how to disable the whole touchpad; I’ll just use a mouse.
The service person said, yes, I will do that for you.
The service person then went into this long and complicated routine to be able to operate my machine remotely, which involved installing an app, installing a java applet, etc, etc. She ran some “Omni PC Health” thing, which claimed that my computer was horribly screwed up, running at only 40% of its performance, and was infected with malware. Then she started telling me (this is via chat) of the wonderful virtues of their paid support, and how it would rid me of all these terrible problems, fix my horrible (but entirely unspecified) malware problem, and so on.
In short, the purpose of Sony’s “free support” is to scare people into paying money to Sony. This is fraudulent marketing.
There was a satisfaction survey at the end. I explained all this (briefly) and told them they ought to be ashamed of themselves. They should.
August 6th, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Do you have any evidence that they don’t routinely behave like this? Have you ever seen contrition for acts they have committed in the past like the rootkit issue? Did you not notice the saga where they would charge $50 to remove the bloatware? Have you heard any good things about their recruiting?
ie have you seen any evidence that they are a decent company with decent practises? (Note that I am not even getting into the technical side of things with their propensity for proprietary formats, crappy software etc)
Perhaps the shame should really be on the purchaser
August 6th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Generally speaking you reboot into the BIOS, and it has some option to disable the touchpad. I hate those things.
August 7th, 2010 at 5:27 am
I’m sure a senior executive at some point thought this was a great cross-selling opportunity. Very likely is.
The details are in the execution. I expect that a more delicate touch with the right people (e.g. those who actually do have malware issues) would be very effective.
August 7th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
I have no problem with trackpads, and never bother with a mouse when using my laptop (a MacBook Pro), but I despise tap-to-click, for exactly the reason you say: it’s way too easy to accidentally tap yourself into some other place on the screen. Who ever thought this was a good idea? Fortunately, it’s easy to turn off on the Mac.
August 9th, 2010 at 7:55 am
Roger: Well, in all fairness, the people who did the rootkit stuff are probably very, very far away in the corporate hierarchy from the people who set up this heavy-handed cross-selling “opportunity”. No, I didn’t know about the $50, and that sounds like it might be the same people. Nor had I heard about the recruiting. Thanks for the info!
August 10th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
John: I finally figured out how to “get into the BIOS”, namely hold down F2 while booting. Unfortunately there are very few options there. It has the usual one to change the boot order of devices for booting off CD/DVD and such. But little else, and nothing about the touchpad. Thanks for the idea!