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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."
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.
From the articles I've read, it appears to be a design flaw with many recent Toshiba notebooks.
This is definitely the last Toshiba I will ever buy. It's unfortunate that Sony pissed me off so badly with the DRM fiasco -- I like their Vaio laptops. Spendy, but nice, but I'll never buy Sony again, either.
Maybe it's time to buy a Powerbook.
I run Linux on my iBook G4, and I would say the install was not as a waste of time.
A year and a half ago I wanted to buy a laptop that was lightweight, inexpensive (under $1200 tops), had a good keyboard, had good battery life, came from a vendor with a good reputation for reliability and service, and came with internal wireless. I spent hours racking my brain over half-decent PC designs, and I ended up finding inexpensive but low-quality machines (Compaq), expensive but great ones (IBM), or decent ones with terrible keyboards (Dell).
Then I realized I could buy an Apple and install Linux on it. So that's what I did, Debian first, then Ubuntu. It runs all my applications just fine, and it's a great laptop.
I was originally going to dual-boot, but I had the computer shipped to my parents' house, and they eagerly threw away the box and OS X DVD. In the end, I don't think I mind. Debian and Ubuntu have been good to me.
|/usr/games/fortune
I'll add my experience to this as both an end-user and also an ex-systems house/reseller engineering manager:
Sony - don't sneeze near them, something will break. Big price premium for the brand name. Early ilfe (out of the box or soon after) failures 'notable'.
Dell - clunky, heavy and below-optimal performance. Run hot
Toshiba - over-priced for what you get. Choose your model carefully.
Acer - well priced and fewer hassles than all the above.
IBM - Generally well engineered and mostly reliable.
My personal, mainstream favourite is Acer
AT&ROFLMAO
There are several fair reasons why many choose to run Linux on their Apple portable. OSX has an awful bash implementation by default, has poor memory management (sluggish to say the least), is pro DRM and is, by and large, extremely inflexible. As a so called UNIX operating system, it's going very much in the wrong direction. From what I've seen of of Ubuntu or Yellow Dog on the PB/iBook it's a breath of life (Apple Airport and lacking w32codec support aside).
Apple is in the business of choking their own machines to drive hardware sales - and why wouldn't they?
That, however, is a consumer treadmill many LinuxPPC users recognise and so have chosen to avoid.
Did she install the OS, or was it pre-configured? If it was pre-configured, then a comparison to Windows is weak. It's just as easy to enter a WEP key in Windows, they even have a pretty little popup dialog to ask you if it is determined that one is required. And SP2 is secure out-of-the-box, with firewall & auto-upgrades turned on.
TCO means NOTHING for one machine. When you admin a few dozen, then it matters.