If you plan on protecting your PS3 from nasty power surges don’t plan on keeping your warranty. A member of the Playstation forums shared his little encounter with a Sony support rep:

So I woke up yesterday morning and saw that my PS3 was not on. You know that little light letting you know it’s getting power? That morning, no light. This happened once before, but I was able to unplug it and plug it back in to get power, and then it worked. I tried that yesterday morning, but nada. Nothing would work… it was completely dead and not getting power.

So I call Sony and let them know that my less-than 4 month old PS3 was now a brick. I tried to tell the guy that the trouble started when I first tried to play Call of Duty 3 a while back - it would just completely shut off the system and the only way to get it back on was to unplug it and replug it back in. (an issue that’s been well-documented now in threads such as these.)

The service representative didn’t care about any of that. Instead, he starts asking me a bunch of questions to try and void my warranty. Things like, “I want you to check the sticker above the hard drive and tell me if it looks damaged.” I’m like, “no, no, no” to everything he’s asking. Then he asks me if I had a power surge recently. Again, I tell him no, that I have all my electronics protected with a high quality power surge protector. He then says “okay, great, Sony can fix it right up for you for $150.” I asked how long the warranty was, and he said a year… but then he tells me that I voided my warranty by plugging it in to a surge protector. I asked him if he was kidding me, and he says nope, the PS3 is only allowed to be plugged into the wall directly.

So basically Sony hopes you ruin your stuff my not doing to simplest thing every person should know to do? And when you have a surge they will claim they can’t protect against an act of God. Either way it is stupid that Sony would require you to only plug your stuff into the wall socket or lose the warranty. If all companies did that I would lose warranties on computer, monitor, TV, Wii, PS2 (oops guess I already did) but do I need to go on?

[tags] PS3, warranty, void, Sony[/tags]