During the first weekend of the year, Son#2 downloaded new firmware for his PSP and attempted to perform an upgrade. But just before the firmware upgrade completed, his PSP’s screen suddenly went black. It had apparently died. When it was turned on, the power light would come on, but the screen would remain blank. It was “bricked,” as we later learned on the Internet.
We googled for hours, searching in vain for way to recover it, but instead found hundreds of horror stories of people who’s PSPs had been bricked, and of the draconian “support” they had received by Sony. Our only real choice was to send it back to Sony for service.
Son#2 had purchased it with “birthday” money from a local Walmart a few months back, so it was well within the 12 month warranty period. However, we couldn’t find the receipt and, being a cash purchase, didn’t have any other documentation Sony would accept as proof of purchase. Comparing notes we were able to narrow the purchase date down to a two week period and a very helpful Walmart Manager was able to locate the purchase in their Transactions database and printed a copy of it for us.
So on January 10th, Son#2’s PSP was shipped off to Laredo, Texas, for repair or replacement, at Sony’s discretion.
Late yesterday afternoon, I received a call from an excited Son#2: his replacement PSP had arrived! He was quite happy to have it back.
Today, less than 24 hours after arriving, the replacement PSP began failing. When UMDs (PSP game disk-cartridges) were inserted, the PSP would attempt to read them, but would fail: disk is unreadable. We tried several times with different UMDs, and always got the same results: the disk would spin up for about 2 seconds, then would stop.
I’ve already called Sony, and this PSP will be shipped back to them tomorrow. Judging from the previous time, we should see the repaired/replacement unit in about two weeks.
While on the phone making arrangements for this machine to go back, the support representative informed me — as they had the previous time — that our original PSP had a 12 month warranty, that replacement PSPs come with a 90 day warranty, and that our effective warranty would be either 90 days or the remainder of our 12 month warranty, which ever is longest.
My suggestion that they extend our original warranty by the 4 weeks Son#2 will have been without his PSP fell on deaf ears. Considering all that we’ve heard about Sony in the news in recent months, I wasn’t surprised.