How bad is Toshiba support?

Better than most.

I had a mediocre experience with Toshiba’s Support when I had just bought my Satellite 1415-S173.

I was having a repeating problem with the touchpad driver not loading but the tecky on the phone just kept reading out of his manuscript. Well, I just followed his instructions, to the letter, and didn’t solve the problem. On calling again I got a different tech person but he was reading from the same manuscript. I interrupted him to ask if they were allowed to give advice that wasn’t in the manuscript <grin> but he acted as if he didn’t hear me. I finally said good-bye and hung up. After thinking the problem through myself for several hours I sat down and solved it myself. I called up again and referred to the earlier calls and, what do you think? The same manuscript! Well, I told him that I was calling because I had solved the problem and they could now update their manuscript. Not interested. Finally I went on the Toshiba forums and posted the problem as SOLVED, which helped some others.

The point of all this is to tell you that if you buy Toshiba’s repair insurance (or anybody else’s, for that matter) – I think of it as repair “insurance”– don’t think that you will get much over the phone. The bottom line is that you will get access to shipping the laptop to a repair center and waiting about 1 1/2 months to get the thing back repaired. But it *will* be repaired. That’s what you’re paying for.

EPILOGUE: Two weeks later Toshiba began offering my solution to the problem. (No credit to me, of course.) http://www.notebookforums.com/images/smilies/nono.gif

In two words, piss poor. Go read this thread about how Toshiba produced an entire line of notebooks (5105 series with GeForce4 Go 440 video cards that were defective. Of course they generally failed after the warranty expired... and Toshiba would do nothing about it. **ALL** of these video cards have failed or will fail. And Toshiba doesn't even make replacements available at a reasonable price. Well done refurbs are going for something like $350 and there is no guarantee they will last very long. So there are many of us who have perfectly good notebooks that are headed to the dump for the lack of a video card.

Toshiba should have realized that being cheap would hurt them as I and othere are ordering new notebooks from other vendors. Maybe it'll be better or maybe it won't but Tosh is a known entity to me and I'll not get fooled again.

http://www.notebookforums.com/thread48948.html

and you think you are alone.... it doesnt matter what vendor you are with video cards are not "affordable" in fact in most machines they simply were not replaceable at all without a new motherboard. there is no guarantee that you will have a machine that lasts forever no matter what you buy. toshiba did its legally required duty to provide replacements in the course of the warranty period but after that expires they are as all laptop manufacturers under NO obligation to provide you with further parts or support, unless otherwise stipulated in a contract. they did replace the cards for the course of the warranty period as they were required to so in this case i think its a case of more or less tough luck. i feel sorry for your situation but there is nothing that can be done and to put it simply nothing will spring up to save your old machines.

Just doing the minimum required by law in regards to warranties, especially when you have produced a known defective design, is not good business practice. And I am doing something "legal" by buying from another manufacturer. You are correct that they may have their own issues. But unless/until they screw me over like Toshiba I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. As a consumer I am not unreasonable. I give 'em a chance. If they don't come through I just go elsewhere. Simple as that.

And of course I don't think I am alone. Didn't you read the link I provided? EVERY ONE of these machines, unless it is dropped in a lake or something, has died or will die from this one issue.

And NO, I don't consider my notebook "old". The mfgs try to push a bit of forced obsolescence on us but that generally is driven by the op system. Electronics are mostly very reliable these days and the processor, memory, and op system were perfectly adequate for my current uses. And it led a sheltered life mostly as a kitchen table wortkstation, so very few travel bumps. If not for the bad BGA solder for the VRAM chips on the video card this machine had at least a couple of good years left in it.

the other manufacturer that i know of in specific that has people in the same situation is alienware which offered a machine known as the area 51m 766 that had a removeable graphics card which has in most cases died and after the machine ended its warranty period alienware no longer provided parts of other support for them. its not really ideal and certainly from a consumer prospective not something i want to see happening however every industry is moving towards it these days. sadly beyond voting with your $$$ there is nothing that can be done.


i read it, and i have seen it all before. in the end those few people have such a small impact on the manufacturers that its not going to change anything. the large suppliers are far more dependant on business sales than home users. in fact taking another company as an example dell makes so much off its business/government sales that it could (if it was willing to take a low double digit hit in profits) simply stop selling to home users entirely.

in terms of what is on the market now the notebook is long since out of date. yes it still works and im sure it does what you need it to. you obviously have taken good care of it but that doesnt change its place in realtion to the current industry. laptops are not really designed for the same longevity that a true desktop is designed for.

i do agree that it sucks that they become out of date so easily and quickly but nothing can be done and at a certain point companies stop producing new parts for older machines because if they were forced to stock those parts forever then it just would not work. still i would say if you are unhappy buy from another manufacturer but i wouldnt expect alot more than 3 years out of a laptop before it gets very hard to find parts.

Sorry but I continue to disagree with your nonsense. That is just the sort of attitude the manufactureres would like us all to have, to buy into the forced obsolescence of perfectly good machines, accelerated when the failure of one subsystem means you have to throw the whole thing away. I have concluded that you either work for a manufacturer or get your computers for free somehow.

Tosh has dropped the ball in a major way here. First they had deplorable quality control in the design and/or manufacture of the video card, or exerised lax acceptance of said part from a vendor. Second, with the high failure rate that had to be obvious, they didn't ensure an adequate supply of spares for the population of machine sold. Third, they offered no solution to customres who spent a lot of $$ on these machines. It is just extremely poor life cycle management on the part of Tosh. Maybe they think it improves the bottom line a few cents a share but the loss in goodwill of their customers will eventually come home to roost.

It is telling that that similar video cards for closel yrelated Tosh models can be had for $15. Those obvioulsy proved more reliable. Just clueless to have plenty of spares for some models and absolutely none for others.

Compters are tools. Just because the "latest" is more advanced doesn't mean that many of us need it. I like the latest stuff as much as anyone and have some of it. But that doesn't mean I just toss perfectly good machine that is doing what I need and should continue doing so for several more years.

you would be surprised how many times i hear the "you must work for a manufacturer" line, but sadly its not true. i do work in the industry and yes i do get machines on occasion for free, however my primary machine the dell xps in my signature is bought and paid for with my own hard earned cash so dont try playing the you get it for free so you dont need to care line. obsolescence happens get used to it, things break no matter how much care you take and thats just life. if you bought a laptop and intended for it to last for the next decade thats highly unlikely no matter how much you spend or who you buy from, even 3 years is pushing it in terms of the industry itself. there has been research done by the major manufacturers which tells them how long the average user keeps their machine and they design based on that. to that end the people on average keep their laptops 3 years or less, so they are designed with that in mind. besides the fact of the matter is that the processor in your laptop is a heat machine that would be better suited to use as a small portable stove.


toshiba offered a solution when they needed to, they provided their replacements under warranty like they were supposed to. they dont have any obligation to supply general spares to the public, and yes they did perform their warranty needed work which means that you got the services you paid for. sad as it is there is absolutely nothing you can do, toshiba chose to follow the route that they did and as i said home users are such a small part of the bottom line for most large computer manufacturers that the complains of you as an individual ownerwill almost certainly never result in a change. this is especially true since at this point the machines are as i have said woefully out of date in terms of the industry.


its their choice, often they hold supplies of a model until the last of the warranties sold (3 year or 4 year plans) expire. the reason for this is because they are legally required to keep spares to cover those customers who have to make a warranty claim.


indeed in a perfect world it would, however this is not a perfect world. you dont throw your machines away but that saidyou need to realize that you are many generations in the last. toshiba in this sense is no different from any other karge event. you bought a laptop without knowing the risks and thus i would suggest more reading and research before purcahse.

I recieved great Toshiba support with my repaired 2 year old M40! Within 2 years my dvd failed to burn dvds, lcd had a burned mark and just recently HD started to fail. Managed to backup all my info before I sent it in since they were gunna charge just for backup alone. They said it would take 3-4 weeks to replace but ended up only being just 1 week! Now I have fresh new parts that should last me to the end of my extended warranty in 2008. They also managed to upgrade my failing 4.2rpm HD to a 5.2k HD... I give praise to their quick support service and hope others will recieve the same service as I did. (:

Here's a link to a thread I started on my experience with Toshiba support:

http://www.notebookforums.com/thread194996.html

Never again! Back to Dell for us.

well, my experiences with toshiba were pretty good... not with a laptop though. I don' own a toshiba laptop, but when my toshiba dvd player went on the fritz, i made a call, took 5 minutes for the guy to take my info and i got a new one. .. very impressed. not sure about their laptops tho..

as far as dell goes... i love my dell, but it reall depends what you want... dell tech support has been amazing everytime i have called them...
also, just a few days ago dell is giving free screen replacements to older model laptops... FREE>. dell has the money and thats why their support has the potential to be great as shown in this case.

Yes, DVD players have gotten so cheap they were probably happy to ship you a new one just to get rid of inventory. ;-) My problem with Tosh was that they didn't provide reasonable life cycle support for the laptop I bought. The vid cards failed in such numbers that they HAD to know there would be a shortfall. But they didn't ensure an adequate supply of spares. A telling sign of just how bad they handled this is that you can get a refurb video card for a closely related model that has the same form factor for $15! $15!! There is nothing much different between this card and mine to account for the price except that these weren't defective and didn't fail in large numbers. So there is an oversupply. Unfortunately they require a different BIOS so won't work with my machine. So, Tosh was either clueless about the failure rate and didn't compensate, or they intentially walked away from the problem. You decide which is worse.

Here is my story, I bought a G-15 two and half years ago for USD 3000. 13 months later my notebook started to give me all sorts of problems, so I called Toshiba they said my notebook is out of warrenty. I called them five or six times but they refused to help me saying I was out of warranty.
This year I heard about mobo enhancement and I did that, but my notebook turned from bad to worse. I have replaced three harddrives, and a motherboard. Now I have 10 vertical clolorful lines flickering on my screen. When my notebook is on, I can't hear a thing in my room, because it is noiser than a fast flowing river. Oh the notebook is now slower than pentium 2 computers my friend has.
I called Toshiba ten times about the problem without success. Then I went to their website and found out that they have extended warrenties for G-15's by one year. So I called the customer relations again and told them that since I called them six times during my second year of owning the laptop, I should get my laptop repaired for free. But they said my laptop is out of warrenty. I told them, I called them within warrenty, but they customer service told me I was out of warrenty., even though I was still withtin extended warrenty.
So as of now I am a software engineering student who was dumb enough to spend 3000 USD on a piece of crap, whose manufacturers doesn't care about customers at all, even though they made a mistake. They lied to me about the warrenty, still they don't take responsibility. Since I spent all my money on that piece of crap, I can't afford to buy a new one.
I wish I can afford a lawyer, so that I can sue their ass.
P.S I was really polite with them, I pleaded as if my life was at risk.

Welcome to the club. Sorry you had to become a member. Tosh used to be known for quality notebooks back in the day. Seems like a day far distant. I had a simarly unsympathetic customer "service" experience with them.

Never owned a Toshiba laptop, so I can't comment on their support. But I do own a Dell E1405, and everytime I've contacted Dell, I've gotten nothing but GREAT service from them. Driver CDs and software reinstall cds arrived at my doorstep next day after I contact them. I recently had an LCD problem, they sent a prepaid box for me over night. The laptop got to them over night. And now its already on its way back, scheduled to arrive Monday. Very fast considering I shipped it out on Wednesday, and DHL doesnt work weekends. Another thing was that Dell told me to remove all my ram, hard drive, and battery before shipping it back to them, which I thought was cool since I didn't have to worry about backing up data before shipping out the laptop. If you want top notch service, go with Dell. Their laptops aren't built as great as Toshibas, but they're still very good laptops. And hey if a Dell fails, you know you'll get it fix, no questions asked within a week...as compared to over month with Toshiba?

uh... good for you?

but you'll notice the thread's about Toshiba support, not Dell support