Surge protector voids PS3 warranty?!

[Dejackso]

madskillz said:

Is this real?

PS3 warranty voided by surge protector - 'great' pay up $150 say Sony

A member of the Playstation forums called up Sony regarding his four month old PS3 which had turned into a brick, with the trouble starting back a while ago when the system would just shut off. However, the Playstation rep wasn't interested in all that, as soon as he heard the gamer had used a high quality power surge protector, the rep remarked 'okay great, Sony can fix it right up for you for $150' as the year-long warranty was voided by the surge protector.

quote:

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.

News Source: Playstation

 

It's probably real.  There was an issue with the Xbox 360 and one of the intercooler devices that Microsoft wouldn't honor the warranty if you used that specific intercooler.  Their reason (which was a fair one, I think) was that the intercooler would draw its power through the 360 rather than through the power supply and this caused a significant increase in 360 failures.