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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."
Useless unless you put linux on it ;)
Be or ben't
"UP to $1000.."
..i'm sure it wont be that much, more like $150.
To dare, is to do.
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...
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.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
CNet Rating: 7.8
Avg. User Rating: 3.1
From the review "As corporate as a blue suit and a tacky tie, Toshiba's Satellite Pro 6100 is a desktop-replacement notebook built strictly for business...the Satellite Pro 6100 is that rare notebook that does everything well enough to replace a desktop computer."
How are we supposed to trust CNET's ratings now? Shouldn't they review and change their ratings to reflect its true/overall quality?
'As corporate as a blue suit'... maybe it works great in one of those corporations like Enron - looks great at first and works okay for a while, but later it comes crashing to the ground.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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.
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.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
It could be that review units were manufactured to a higher standard, or subjected to more rigorous quality control, than general retail units. All they'd have to do is cherry-pick 30 perfect laptops from 30,000 wonky ones, send that 30 to review sites, and the product looks good. After all, CNet are testing the quality and design of the hardware, not its reliability.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I guess we had a lucky batch or something, and maybe so did CNet. It's Either that or a golden sample.
I guess it also passed its pee test.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Almost all "mass media" reviews of products occur when the product is released.
As a result, unless there are blatantly obvious build quality problems - "feels flimsy" and such, build quality/reliability problems go unnoticed in the initial review. Many build quality and reliability problems are invisible until a product has been available long enough for failures to occur.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
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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.
This is a problem specifc to several root causes, with more than just CNET but other sites and magazines as well:
When the "editor" product review varies that heavily from user reviews, you can tell there is a problem -- not just with the product but the review process as well.
{ - Generic Guy - }
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. ;). 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.
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
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.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
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
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.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
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.
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.