Do you own a Toshiba laptop? Are you planning to buy one? If the answer is “yes”, you will probably be interested in reading about my personal experience and rethink your options. Any similarity to living persons or actual events is more than just a coincidence.
For almost two years I was the proud owner of a spectacular Toshiba Sattelite Pro 3000 laptop computer, a marvellous machine that seemed able to do (almost) everything I wanted it to.
I bought this computer when it first came out, in August 2001, just before I moved to the Netherlands for my PhD studies. At the time it was (at least for my needs) amazingly powerful, very fast, and with what I considered to be an infinite amount of disk space. (Some people have argued that 20Gb is really nothing, but well... I still have most of it free, and the only thing that really takes up space is the operating system!
Sure enough, there were indications from the beginning that our relationship might one day become turbulent. For some mysterious reason I could never get the battery to charge in one go—apparently, some part of the computer got too hot and it stopped charging the battery—, but I never complained about it anyway (mea culpa!), as it didn't really bother me that much.
Then came the Mystery of the Misbehaving Floppy Drive, which was never solved. One fine day in November my floppy drive simply stopped working (some noise could be heard when it was moved, so it sounded like something inside it had become loose); so I sent it to the Toshiba Repair Centre in The Netherlands (since no one but themselves is allowed to touch Toshiba laptops in this country). I wasn't especially impressed with the way it went, since I spent five minutes on the phone trying to explain to a very helpful but incompetent person how I could send them only the floppy drive without dismantling the whole computer... If they can't figure that one out, should I really trust them with the repair? Oh Golly.
Anyway, after much discussion I finally persuaded the lady that it was possible to send the floppy drive without the computer; one week later it came back with a note that “nothing wrong could be found with it”, so it had not been repaired. Well, as it was working, I marvelled at the abilities of this people, who could solve problems without even finding them!
The real trouble started in June 2003, when my screen went dead. Well, not exacly dead, but it appeared to suffer from some epilepsia-kind of disease. Periodically it would have these attacks, flicker for a couple of seconds and promptly reduce its contrast so much that nothing short of white on black could be seen. Which made it obviously unsuitable to work with.
Since I work with an external monitor most of the time anyway, I did not immediately get it repaired. The problem was, the symptoms were of the intermittent kind; and once, when on holidays in Portugal, after not being able to use the laptop for one week, I actually took it to the shop where it had originally been bought only to come back disappointed, for the prospect of being sent to repair made its screen start working and behave properly for the next 48 hours.
Well, at this stage I decided I'd had enough, and when I came back to the Netherlands I decided to get the computer repaired anyway. Since it was also my work computer, I wanted to do it through the university channels, which meant waiting for the responsible person to come back from holidays. Unfortunately the two-year warranty also ended during that period; and The Heat Wave struck Europe, adding yet another malaise to my laptop's sufferings: it decided spontaneously to shorten its working days, and started turning itself off at 5pm every day. Nothing could persuade it to work again after that.
Fortunately, at this time the holiday season ended and the time became ripe to send the computer to repair. Alas, little did we know that this would only be the beginning of a sad, sad, story which would affect our lives forever afterwards...
Getting Toshiba computer repaired in the Netherlands requires first calling a special Toshiba Help Line at €0,50 per minute. Even this trivial first step can be quite far from straightforward to take: the first time we tried (at this point I was being helped in my plight by a computer expert from the university) we got a message (which we paid €1 to hear) saying that they had closed at 16.45—bad luck, since our watches both said it was still only 16.44.
Next day we called again, and we spent about ten minutes (or €5) on the telephone just waiting for our turn. Then a very helpful young man listened to our problem and gave us the address of a computer shop—totally unrelated to Toshiba —which would undertake the repair.
Our spirits lifted, we immediately contacted that shop. They sent us a form, which we filled in with the description of the screen problem and faxed back to them. The next day they called us: they apologized, but they were not allowed to repair Toshiba computers. We expressed our surprise, since Toshiba was actually where we had got their address from; they offered to ask Toshiba for special permission, and called back ten minutes later to say that they had been stricly forbidden to deal with our problem. They gave us a (normal) phone number to call, and we were back to step 1.
We called Toshiba again, this time at this “cheaper” (long-distance) number. Another man answered the phone, and after listening to our problem said that he was very sorry, but we would have to call the Toshiba Help Line for this. Fortunately I'm not the only person in the world with a bad temper; and I was very glad that my colleague who was actually on the phone refused to accept that answer and complained very strongly that we had already done that, with no result but losing two days and helping to balance the budget of the Dutch telephone company.
At this, the man changed his tone and kindly gave us a fax number to which we could send (again) the description of my laptop's problems. No comments.
The next part was quick. We sent them a fax; got a form in return; and filled this form in. By this time I was so annoyed at the state of affairs—I had already lost two days' work with this mess—that I decided I wanted to complain about everything that was wrong. So, since the two lines available on their form were not enough, we wrote down a half-page long nice description of everything: the Screen's Epileptic Condition (SEC); the Power Adapter's Charging Ailment (PACA); the I Only Work Till Five Phenomenon (IOWTFP); and (this one was nasty) the Unspecified Problem of the Sound Card (UPSC), also present since the beginning of time: sometimes, for no apparent reason, the sound card did not initialize properly when the computer booted. All sounds would afterwards be distorted, and the only solution was to reboot the computer and hope everything would be OK. The UPSC seemed to always show up if I closed the lid while booting (remember I was using an external monitor), but besides that there seemed to be no regularity in its occurrence.
The next day we got a reference number and sent the laptop by post (!) to somewhere around Rotterdam to get fixed. After a week we got their estimate cost of repair: around €450 to replace a malfunctioning VGA-something. Although this seemed to be a plausible explanation for the SEC (at least to my limited understanding of computer hardware), they apparently didn't care about the PACA, the IOWTFP and the UPSC, but since the second had only happened during a couple of days when the temperature in my office had climbed to almost 40 degrees, and the other two had never really prevented me from working, we decided not to complain and just get the SEC solved.
After one more week my laptop coming back. Trembling with expectation we assembled in my office with a bottle of champagne, ready to celebrate the event.
We never did. When I turned the computer on the screen was as blank (or rather, as dark) as ever. At the fourth reboot it decided to behave normally for about thirty seconds before relapsing. The university thank God, not me) had just spent more than a week of my salary for nothing.
Barely ten minutes after the computer arrived we were back on the telephone speaking to someone from Toshiba (since they had kindly sent a telephone contact for the unlikely event of our not being pleased with their service). After insisting for a while, we managed to speak to the person who had done the actual repair.
The ensuing conversation would not have been misplaced in a funny movie.
Only in real life such situations are seldom funny. Here's more or
less how it went:
Toshiba: What's the problem?
Us: Our computer still doesn't work.
T: How do you mean, it doesn't work?
U: The problems it originally had still persist
T: What problems?
U: The ones we complained about originally.
T: You didn't complain about anything.
U: No? We sent an apart page filled only
with complaints!
T: We never got that page. You wrote in the
description of the problem “see next page”, but we only
received one page.
U: What? Then why did you replace the
VGA-whatsoever?
T: Oh, that. We ran some tests on the computer,
and that piece was reacting bad under stress. Normally that
shouldn't be a problem, but since we could find nothing else wrong we
decided to replace it.
U: Let me see if I get this correctly. You
received a fax referring to the next page; you received no next page; you
had our e-mail and telephone; but yet, instead of asking what was wrong,
you just decided to replace a €350 piece which probably wasn't
causing problems anyway?
T: Yes, that's right.
U: ...
Well, this time I'm being faithful and not exaggerating at all. Fortunately the guy realized this didn't sound too good, so he told us just to send our computer back together with the list of problems, and he would look at it the minute it arrived.
We did so. Then for two lo-o-o-ong weeks we heard nothing.
After waiting for two weeks, we got another message from Toshiba, this time by e-mail. After “144 hours of testing” (sic) they could find no traces of any of our four problems: the SEC, the PACA, the or the UPSC. These problems had probably already been solved by the replacement of the VGA-piecey.
(Does “testing” include turning on the computer?, I wondered...)
Trying not to sound as if we were being called stupid, we wrote a very nice e-mail where we explained that we had only sent the laptop back because the SEC was clearly not solved, and therefore the replacement of the VGA-howdyacallit could not have solved that. Of course, this sounds pretty unconvincing by e-mail, but whose fault is it that Toshiba does not have a place where you can go and actually show what is wrong with your computer, so that you don't have to try to explain it by e-mail?
We did our best. We redescribed the symptoms of the SEC (though mentioning that it was a disappearing/reappearing problem, and maybe the healthy airs of Rotterdam prevented it from attacking at all); we stated that the PACA had always been a characteristic of that computer; we told them to try booting the computer with the lid turned down so they would be introduced to the UPSC; and (thinking we were being very nice) told them to forget about the IOWTFP, since it only occurred on extremely hot days and there aren't so many of those in the Netherlands anyway.
We didn't have to wait long for an answer. And oh boy, what an answer! On a positive note, they had actually identified and solved the UPSC (it turned out to be a BIOS problem which affected all Toshiba computers of that model when they tested it, but turning off the warning beep when you close the lid solved it); but the PACA and the SEC remained as evasive as ever.
What they didn't like was our dropping the IOWTFP complaint. What? They had so efficiently solved this one by replacing the VGA-thingey and we were dropping this? Were we next going to accuse them of having replaced a part without need? And they had tested the computer with the old piece and it hung very easily, whereas with the new piece it never hung at all.
Hang on! Who said anything about “hanging”? Our complaint was that the computer turned itself off, not that it hung up. Off. Dead. And yes, we were accusing them of replacing a piece without reason, since this was the first time they actually provided a reason to do it. But we didn't put this in the mail; we thanked them a lot for (once again) solving a problem we hadn't complained about (though it is true, the computer was hanging a bit too often, but isn't that a consequence of its relying on an operating system?); and since they offered to replace another piece for free to solve the non-existing SEC, we told them to do that and send the laptop back.
Well, five weeks after the beginning of the saga my laptop finally came back. As if by miracle, all problems appear have been solved. The SEC has not struck in the weeks since; the PACA appears to have subsided (could the replacement VGA-badguy account for this? It sounds absurd to me, but then hardware is utterly illogical); the UPSC was successfully solved; and the IOWTFP might show up again on when the next heat wave comes to visit, but as that should not happen in the next decade I don't worry too much.
Yet I am not happy. For five weeks I could not work properly, being forced to use a borrowed computer which didn't have enough disk space to store all my files and where I couldn't use Linux at all; between the journeys to and from Rotterdam my power cable and two of the computer's rubber feet got lost, and Toshiba refused to send me new ones, meaning that I had to buy a cable at my own expenses and that my computer runs away from me everytime I try to work at home; and I cannot help but have the feeling that everything would have happened much more smoothly if (1) I had been able to speak face-to-face with someone, showing them what was wrong with the computer and (2) if Toshiba didn't have a monopoly of the repair services in the Netherlands. Talk about the benefits of competition.
I don't ever plan to buy a Toshiba again. I doubt that bothers them at all, since I am just a lonely consumer. But if I can help it neither will anyone I know.