Darth Jello
I'm posting this for stories, reactions, and as a warning. Now Toshiba has kind of a rep for supposedly making higher end consumer pc's but not so with their mid to low end sattelite line. A brief search will reveal multiple multibillion dollar consumer class action lawsuits against Toshiba wherein they have been found guilty of knowingly and maliciously selling tens of millions of defective products on the US market. I recently learned this first hand with a Toshiba Sattelite m300 i bought 4 months ago. One of the usb ports never worked and a week ago the motherboard died. The obviously outsourced tech on the phone told me data recovery was not covered under warrenty so if i sent it in for an exchange, i'd lose it all and he couldn't guarantee the data on my harddrive would not be used "by toshiba or othet friendly companies for market research or other business." so i took it in to an authorized repair shop where they gave me a 3-5 day estimate on repairs. They call me after 3 days to tell me the following: the motherboard they installed is also defective and toshiba's distribution network is down so repairs may take between several days to several months during which time they will bill me if i go out of warrenty or if they damage my harddrive and i want my memory backed up. i also cannot exchange my notebook since its in the repair process until after repairs are done and that since its not one of their pro top of the line models i should expect no reliability from my hardware and was even told my harddrive would probably fail within two months and that i should just buy a higher end model and tossed them a hundred bucks to dump my memory on it (company policy-no harddrive enclosures). As of today its been more than a week, its still in the shop, and im using my goddamn nintendo wii for internet. Now i was under the impression that having a mid to low end product entailed less functionality, not no reliability. I also thought that creating a problem and ten charging and/or coercing someone into fixing it was a federal crime called racketeering. Anyone else have similar stories? maybe think toshiba Usa should have to spend some quality time in front of a grand jury since this is part of a pattern of behavior?