Sony loses the plot on custom build Vaios

It became time for me to purchase a new laptop, and so after a bit of research I settled on a Vaio. Before you say it, I know it's not as cool as a MacBook Pro, but in the current climate I couldn't really justify paying twice as much so I settled for a custom build FW series to give me good resolution and a reasonable balance of other features without breaking the bank. So far so good and I placed my customised order.

Unfortunately, Sony decided that I was untrustworthy so even though my credit card went through fine they still rejected my order based on some trumped-up excuse about failing some other security checks (the Sony guy I spoke to claimed they're the third most defrauded company in the UK). Of course they couldn't tell me which security checks because that might enable me to defraud them in some other way, but it turned out that was not the biggest problem.

The biggest problem was with their order management software. Because my original order was rejected they had to place a new one, but there was some problem with their software so I was asked to call back in a couple of days. This I did, to be told that there was still a problem with their software. A couple more attempts, and I found out that what was actually happening was that they had a problem where the software would reset any custom builds back to the default configuration as soon as you saved the order. This is obviously not good, and even more not good was that Sony only discovered this after they'd shipped some units to customers (presumably who weren't too happy with what they received).

This has got to be pretty damn embarrassing for Sony, and I really hope that they're throwing some toys out of cots at their software supplier as I suspect that they would be one of the really big, really should know better suppliers, who probably charge lots of money because they have really good QA departments. Or not.

And in the mean-time, it's been ten days since I decided to buy a Vaio rather than a MacBook, I'm still waiting for a call to say I can resubmit my order, and now I'm starting to reconsider my decision...