business worries

Hello all,
I’ve been umming and ahhing about which new laptop to buy, and finally I made my decision (at least I thought I had). It was between a lenovo xp300 and a tz32. I decided on the latter. Now for the down part. I live in the UK and work for the NHS. I want to buy the laptop through work but my IT man kindly says to me
a) Sony business support is not good, in the past he has sent a machine off and had to wait six months for it to be repaired.
b) they don’t support vista. Now I would actually prefer XP pro myself, but don’t know if it is available as an option or indeed compatible with the sony software.

So I have a couple of questions. My IT man’s experience of business support isn’t recent. Has it improved for UK customers, can you get extended warranties and quick response and return?

Secondly, is the TZ32 available with XPpro? If not, would it invalidate any warranty if my IT people install it, and indeed would all of the Sony stuff work with XP?

Hope that’s not too many questions, but advice would be great.

Matthew

 

I would ask this question- why the flipping.. is there not a centralized agreement for IT purchases???? you'd save £££, 300+.. there is most likely such as deal, but finding the person internally in NHS.. good luck- call sony, dell etc to ask if you have a deal with them- trust me you can save loads...

support will be different from org to org, I suggest you check what you can get through NHS- trust me what e.g Goldman Sacs will get is different from Lloyds...

this is where most of the gains will be. you get what you pay for, which sadly is try with NHS but that is not your fault, that's down to ppl that don't know what they do..I don't know about you, but I always seem to find these ppl high up..

 

I don't know about the UK, but I know here in the states Sony's business support has improved by leaps and bounds just over the last two years. Sure it sucked in the past, and sometimes it still does (especially when your business customer calls up the consumer support line) at times, but overall, my problems reported from customers of mine with respect to Sony's support have decreased to almost nothing over the last year.

As for XP support, all of the new TZ's released here in the states have an XP Pro downgrade disk in the box, to make the downgrade away from Vista easy.

It looks like they have at least the drivers available for you over there:

http://support.vaio.sony.co.uk/os/xp/downgrade/index.asp?site=voe_en_GB_prof&m=3086

 

Hmm, I've been trawling their website and business support looks ok with 3 year extended warranties with next day on site repair available. I wonder if they do have a central NHS purchasing agreement that we could tap into? I'll check tomorrow and let people know the outcome.
Thank you for all of the help.
Matthew