Stupid Toshiba engineering
 

WE bought a Toshiba Satelite Laptop for about $2300 at Costco two years ago. It has a 17" screen and worked just fine until a few days ago.
I took it to my trusted computer doc. It had a hard drive failure. When he opened it up the hard drive was completely sealed off in a alum. foil wrap! These things need to breathe he tells me and then he consulted another top service guy he uses who had a long hardy laugh at what a bone headed thing this is for Toshiba to have done. He suggested it was a clear path to built in obselence...
If you own one of these "********* Jap products" or your considering buying one... BEWARE!
It will cost me $300 to replace the hard drive with something that will hold up and restore all my vital data.
I'll never buy another Toshiba product!
I'm not bitter though... well hell, yes I am too!

In my 26 years of IT experience Toshiba laptops have always been quirky.

Toshiba used to be the best in the laptop business...I've owned eight of them all the way back to a 286! but in the past four years their quality has dropped sharply. They used to make them in-house in Japan, but four years ago they started to outsource design and production. My last two Toshibas have had a lot of problems...my latest one (the Sat. Pro 6100) had a class action lawsuit on it because it had so many bugs! Mine has been back to the factory three times in two years.

BTW, your hard drive was probably made in China like most other electronics these days. Let me guess...you didn't keep good backups? I work in IT also, and the angriest clients I've ever experienced are those who don't do regular backups.

time to change Mac is what you are looking for
my .02
I've owned several of them. the last one was a Satellite A75-S2131 with heat problems after 3 months.

>time to change Mac is what you are looking for

I like Macs, but they have just as much or more hardware and software issues as PCs do. I have service call statistics at at two universities I've worked at to back this up.

Considering I'm typing this on a toshiba satliete M35-S456 that I got about 2 years ago this sort of concerns me.

About there stupid engerning and other odiities, they wont send you a replacement keyboard to replace yourself. You have to take it to a designated service center, leave it there while they diagnoise whats wrong (my i key is in the process of falling off) then order and the part and fix it. Estimated time 2-3 weeks. Everyone else I know that has Dells, HPs, and IBM laptops simply calls and then a few day later gets a new keyboard in the mail with instructions on how to replace it. Needless to say, because of this when my sister goes to school this fall she wont being getting a toshiba even though I have been very happy with it otherwise.

If you just need one key try Ebay. I received a Dell missing a few and low-and-behold people part out their keyboards...lol.

The only serious problem I've had with a Mac in the past 5 years is when a Toshiba hard drive failed in a PowerBook. I replaced it with an IBM TravelStar drive (spec'ed by Apple in many units) and it was fine thereafter.

Go to newegg.com and buy your own hard drive for less than $100 and then reinstall Windows. Don't pay someone an extra $200 to do it for you unless they can recover your old data.

I havent had any problems with my Toshiba laptop. Unlike the HP it replaced. Never went three continuous months without a major problem. Hard disk, monitor, AC plug, CD rom, all failed.

My IBM hard drive failed twice.

As far as "********* Jap products", are concerned....I suggest from now on that you only buy computers that are made in the good ol' USA ;)

Its not the key thats missing. The key is still attached to the the keyboard. THe problem is that the brackets supporting the key have been bent and now the key wiggles on the keyboard. Its more an anoyance than anything as the keyboard still functions fine but its redicoulous that they want me to drop of my computer for 3 weeks to fix it.

I tell you, I bought the top end satellite a few years back, 2.5GHZ p4 mobile, not a centrino. 1G ram, special high end vid card, removable keyboard, 17 screen. It seemed amazing.

It turned out to be overhyped junk. They never updated the junky alps touchpad (not synaptics) so you could not accelerate enough to get across the big screen without 3 wipes. The case cracked in 4 places with no rough handling from me. The wireless mouse that was built-in never got a driver update, and had no frills at all.

I tell you, last Toshiba computer I will ever buy. Using a Dell XPS GenII notebook. I've already pinmodded it to go to 2.26GHZ (dothan, like 3.6GHz non mobile) and I've modded it to accept a 7800GTX video card and 2G RAM. I just added another 60G 7200 RPM drive and moved the DVD burner into an external enclosure. Dell all the way man...

I agree. Once upon a time I too had a Satallite Pro and it was the crapiest laptop I had ever owned.

Not too hard to see the concenses here is it? Toshiba is a Japanese word that translates into "attractive $hit in the sewer of Chinese outsourced turds"

Thanks Guys! We're pretty much all on the same page...

IBM and Dell have been wonderful for many years.

Not to forget that there are less than 10 makers of laptops in the WORLD. Many of these laptops are just someone's else's unit with different badges and names, so its difficult to say that "all laptops from Japan" are bad as its hard to say who may have made them.

Just changed the HD in my Dell and it took 1 minute. Two screws and one is out, the new one is in. Kept the old one as a spare. Back up everything by USB drive and networked to the server. Drive cost about $100 (80 gig version) and are available everywhere.

As point of reference:

Dell's large assembly plant in Penang, Malaysia and in China assembles 95% of Dell laptops; the remaining percentage comes from Ireland.

IBM sold their PC division to Lenova, a Chinese-owned company in 2004. IBM still has a 19% stake in the company.

Sherwood

All hard drives eventually fail regardless of make don't they ??

Seems like it can be just luck of the draw which one last longer. My last Dell crapped out early and I'm 4+ years now on my Toshiba. I like the screen on the Toshiba better too.

Funny you talk about toshiba, i have a 120GB back up hard drive from toshiba that failed last month. Started getting machine check errors up the wazoo, so i did what anyone who thinks they know about computers does, unplug things until the message dissappears. On a hunch i disconnected the toshiba since i noticed that if i backed things up on that drive it would provoke the error. And wouldn't you know it, all gone.

All drives fail sooner or later. The bigger the drive size, the sooner it's prone to failure. It's nothing to see an old 6.4 gig drive still kicking after ten years, but amazing to find a 200 gig that will survive more than three years. There are only a handful of hard drive manufacturers in the world too, and all except seagate have dropped their warranty's down to one year. Seagate still gives a 5 year warranty on most of their drives. For what its worth, buy a drive with the longest warranty you can find, and back up important data at least once a month. my $.02 take it for what its worth.