Toshiba Settles Class Action Suit

sidney writes "I was happy to receive an email January 5 informing of a class action settlement that could get me up to $1000 back on my Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 Notebook. This follows an announcement last month that the court granted preliminary approval of settlement. The email looks like a phishing attempt, but whois says the website's domain is owned by Garden City Group who are well known for administering class action settlements. After going through four hard disks, motherboards, power supply daughterboards, and VGA cards in eight repairs during the three-year extended warranty of this piece of junk I'm more than happy to send it back to Toshiba in exchange for a down payment on a new Mac."

Comments

... to a new Mac.

[sirber]

Useless unless you put linux on it ;)

Be wary of the 15" powerbooks..

[Anonymous Coward]

I love my Mac, however with over 1000 registerd complaints pertaining to a lower memory slot failure, and a potential class action lawsuit about to emerge, you could end up with the same problem. http://lowermemoryslot.editkid.com/ Make sure you take out AppleCare...

Re:Be wary of the 15" powerbooks..

[glesga_kiss]

I highly recommend AppleCare if you're getting a laptop from Apple.

Alternately, you could just learn the law regarding faulty goods. I'm not sure how it is stateside, but here in the UK you'd get all of these faults fixed at no cost, regardless of any extended warranties you've purchaced. All new goods must *work*, and this goes beyond the "manufacturers one year warranty" they throw in your face at the first sign of a fault, it's up to six years for some goods. One mention of "Sale of Goods Act" and it changes to "we'll get that fixed for you sir".

I'm not familiar with Apple Care, does it give 24-hour replacements and the like? I did purchace the same deal for my mobile, no hastle next day replacement via courier. Quick turnaround is the only reason I can see for an extended warranty, other than providing commission to the sales person ;-)

Sweet.

[User 956]

After going through four hard disks, motherboards, power supply daughterboards, and VGA cards in eight repairs during the three-year extended warranty of this piece of junk I'm more than happy to send it back to Toshiba in exchange for a down payment on a new Mac."

Good luck with that Mac. And your upcoming class-action lawsuit trying to get it serviced.

Re:Sweet.

[TheRaven64]

As someone whose two-year-old PowerBook is on a its second screen, fifth main logic board, third set of thermal pads and second PSU I am not sure that getting a new Mac is this guy's solution - especially since Apple lost my machine the first time I sent it in for repair (and took a month to admit it and another month to replace it) and took three tries over the course of a month to fix it the most recent time.

Re:Sweet.

[jdbartlett]

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A-10, bottom of the bunch, which I'm going to be replacing with a PowerBook. It's actually been a pretty hardy computer; after three years, my one major complaint with the hardware is that the hinges have broken within the last few months and the battery went the way of all PC battery laptops within a year. However, I'm not impressed with its design, much less with the company's service or atttitude toward me when I called about the hinge problem.

At first, I just thought the hinges needed tightening, which sounds simple enough. Trying to explain to a New Delhi CS agent what was going on and then when being told it's a problem with the case and not covered by a warranty, that was mildly annoying, but not unexpected, it affects most laptop warranties. Being told they wouldn't direct me to any information about the computer that I could use to tighten the hinges myself, that was a little questionable, I've had such information from HP and Gateway without having had to ask. What was really annoying, though, was that every minute in the conversation, the agent would announce that he was going to transfer me to someone who would find a Toshiba approved repair store in my area. That was all he cared about doing and explained the first two. His job wasn't to provide CS, it was to take CS calls and tell people they'd need to take their laptop to a shop and pay more money.

The design itself is a little awkward. I tried pulling the damn thing apart myself to tighten the hinges, but gave up after a couple of hours. The hinges are somewhere under my titanium-covered speakers. I can't get to them, can't do a thing with them. The battery sometimes slips out and clatters to the floor, which I'm not too worried about, it's practically deadweight, after all.

Anyway, I'm in the same boat as the first poster. I'm also fed up with Windows and Linux can't run the commercial apps I use (and no, GIMP is not functionally equivalent to Photoshop!) so a Mac notebook seems to be the way to go. I'm going to wait for the Intels and then see how cheap the G4 PowerBooks get. I'm not desparate yet, but a few other problems and a rattling hard disk and many electric shocks tell me my Toshiba's not long for this world.

My being fed up with Windows isn't a random annoyance. Probably my Toshiba-packaged installation is partly at fault, but I've had to perform system restores almost constantly. It's got to a stage where I have three partitions: one for Linux in case of emergencies, one for Windows, and one for all my work. I see the productivity and stability of my coworkers' macs and turn #00FF00

Toshiba's not a bad company, but I can't recommend their laptops anymore, and I used to swear by them, even by the bottom-rung "entry level" machines. In the meantime, I've been having very good experiences with AppleCare after some problems with my iPod (it's especially nice to be able to talk to someone who lives in this country and actually works for Apple).

Don't buy that new Mac lappy just yet.

[Caspian]

Apple is about to release a new generation of iBooks and/or Powerbooks, most likely including Intel iBooks at least. This month. So hold your horses.

Re:" that could get me up to $1000 back"

[cduffy]

Did you read the settlement terms?

Having more than four qualifying repairs, he'll get $1000 back.

Re:Poor Toshiba Quality

[mccalli]

If it's any consolation, the Toshiba Satellite A75 I purchased last January is also a piece of junk. It is almost impossible to run at high clock speed without overheating. Anything that is both processor- and disk-intensive (like, say, a system-wide antivirus scan) is almost guaranteed to overheat the system. When it overheats, it spontaneously shutsdown.

Don't know if it applies to your system (and with it's age, you don't want to be playing these games anyway) but I recently revived a Dell Inspiron 8000 that had the same problem. I'll skip on what I tried before I reliased this was the issue, but the final solution was to scrape off the old thermal paste and put new paste on the CPU. Since then, not a single shutdown due to overheating.

Cheers,
Ian

Recently?

[Andy Dodd]

The original i8k is an ancient model.

While insufficient thermal paste is one issue, in such an old machine I'd first suspect heatsink dust clogging. (My 8200 has never had any overheating problems, although I have had to clean out the radiator/fans and re-lube the fans once.)

Re:CNET rating 7.8 "Very Good" - why?

[loraksus]

For an added laugh, go take a look at their "worst products of the year"
Lowest score? 3.5 and the Toshiba Satellite M35X-S163 was rated 4.2.

So yeah, basically whore shills.

Your problem was poor research.

[tradiuz]

Toshiba and IBM make the best laptops out there, the trick is you have to buy the correct model. The satelite laptops are doorstops, the one you should have gone with was the Tecra line, they're bulletproof. IBM's Thinkpad line is also superb. Sony's laptops are worse than the Satelite line. I havent had enough experience with Compaq/HP laptops recently, but the Armada line used to be the chosen one way back when.

You know, this isn't _that_ surprising.

[loraksus]

Toshiba has had one of the worst records for laptop manufacturer's out there, both in terms of reliability and the people who they hire for "support". This isn't exactly news, people have been complaining about them for years. Google "toshiba sucks" and you're going to get results about laptops and PDAs.
To those who don't know, Toshiba makes a lot of other things BESIDES laptops and PDAs (stuff like, oh, I don't know, something to do with propeller milling for submarines ;). The worst thing is, they have techs that you can actually understand, but talking to their techs is like talking to the retarded child of a 7-11 employee.

That said, once you actually talk to someone without an indian accent, you're set. The folks they still have here are quite reasonable and easy to deal with. Probably the fastest way to do this is to file a BBB claim or contact their registered agent directly.
Still, if don't want to cough up blood from a newly formed ulcer, get a warranty from another company (i.e. not toshiba). Not dealing with their support is easily worth $150ish.

Re:Poor Toshiba Quality

[An dochasac]

Get the Toshiba fan utility from here: http://www.buzzard.me.uk/toshiba/index.html You can force the fan on all of the time. It's the only way I can keep my toshiba (A-something?) laptop from shutting down and melting every time the CPU rises above 800Mhz, God know you could never do anything serious like gaming, spreadsheets or scrolling graphical web pages on one of these. If Toshiba _EVER_ provides a fix or financial compensation for those of us stuck with one of these unreliable laptops, I might consider buying a toshiba again.

What about Canadian customers?

[Skyguard]

anyone have any idea what Canadian customers can do? I've sent mine in twice for servicing. The article suggests this is for US customers only.

Just curious,
PL from Calgary

Re:Poor Toshiba Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the A7x series, and a lot of the P3x series, is the copper fan grills tend to accumulate a ton of dust on them. The airflow is blocked completely after a while, and the system hangs. It is a design flaw, but Toshiba hasn't admitted to it yet. They just claim dust is a foreign substance and not their fault.

Toshiba builds some of their laptops in house, but outsources a lot of other models to other manufacturers, and it seems these are the ones that are lower quality. If you're buying a Toshiba, look for a serial number that ends in a "J". You likely won't have any problems.

From a Toshiba Authorized Repair Tech, in Canada.

Re:Poor Toshiba Quality

[AviLazar]

What about IBM or Dell...or even HP?

I had a Toshiba (satellite 1955)...I liked it, but I did have to get the motherboard replaced...and their tech support people are morons.
Then again, when I got my dell, I had to get the HD replaced three days after I got the laptop (ugh the software re-installation).

Funny Toshiba Support Story

[Rocketship Underpant]

My friend (now wife) bought herself a Toshiba Satellite a few years back. It lasted for 2-3 years and then just died. It was out of warranty, but we called Toshiba's support line and requested repair advice anyway. Nothing happened, so we sold off the few usable parts (battery, RAM module) on eBay and threw the laptop away.

13 months later, a Toshiba technician called her up, saying he'd just gotten her support request. Oh boy ...

Anyway, we're both happy Mac users these days. My wife's G5 iMac did stop booting the other day, but Apple picked it up, fixed it, and dropped it off at the door before the week was over. She didn't even lose any data.

Re:Sad excuse for a settlement...

[omerhj]

From the "Notice.pdf" file in the settlement documents:

"The repairs listed above are "Qualifying Repairs" even if the repairs were performed free of charge under the warranty."

So if you still have the laptop, you probably qualify for the $1000.