Their Tier 1 support is extremely bad. I cannot stress this.
My F8 key wasn't working when I bought my Sony Vaio T140, thus making it very difficult to do a clean install with my own legal copy of Windows XP (you need to press F8 during setup to accept the EULA agreement).
I went through four technicians (I think the fourth was Tier II, because she knew what she was talking about), but the first three were clueless, saying by design (I even asked one of them to verify this with someone higher up) that the F8 was disabled, or they would just transfer me to someone else who couldn't help.
Thankfully my Vaio is in good working order, and I'm a computer tech myself, so I don't plan on speaking with their tech support anytime soon... hoepfully...
Sony is definately not the best company for tech support. I hear Compaq is pretty good these days, and from personal experience Dell wasn't so bad either. I'm disguisted with HP, however (this was right around the time of the HP/Compaq merge, so maybe HP may be different now).
