Toshiba junk laptop and the unrepentant company

Satellite Pro 6100--the hot zone
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UPDATE: 4/26/2005: yesterday 3 replacement hard drives came in. Before noon they were used to replace 3 more crashed HDs that came in the door. Now, one of those is crashing out again. Thank goodness the IBM Thinkpads the freshmen are using are working because I'm using the spares for the poor Toshiba owning group. I've been trying to update my stats for a week and been too busy with repairs and saving data. Hopefully the lawsuit will bring them back to the table; nice, huh? and we're good, longterm, annual, institutional customers, pity the civilian individual owners.

UPDATE 4/7/2005: Toshiba has broken off communication with us due to pending litigation. They have also taken the rather comical step of blocking email from my lsuhsc.edu account due to the number of squeakywheel emails they were receiving.

If this is Toshiba's idea of customer service I don't see how they can remain a viable option for institutional laptop purchasers.

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107 6100s
50+% failure of hard drives
50+% failure of AC adapters
80+% have had one major component replaced
40+% have had at least 3 major replacements

I'm support for medical students and have been alerting Toshiba to these patterns and trying to get help out of them for over a year now. Luckily we got the 4-year warranty so Toshiba is footing the bill, but the failure rate is so catastrophic that many of my 6100 owning sophomores are using spare computers from other classes. My repair facility operates like a shipping/receiving dept on the basis of this one model laptop alone.

Toshiba's response has ranged from denial ("we know of no problems") to total disregard ("it's under warranty, send it in") to ineptitude (a customer service 1-800# with the recording "our agents no longer service this line") to a baffling hide-and-seek game in which they want to make a "deal" (astonishingly they want more $$$ from my students for another model), yet do not return phone calls or answer questions.

We purchase nearly $200K worth of computers every year and through 5 other models we were pleased with, and recommended, Toshiba. As bad as the hardware failure itself has been, finding out how little they value their loyal customers is even more disappointing.