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Toshiba - Leading Crappy Innovation

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CompuTamer

Member with Some Fancy Text Under His Name
Joined
Jan 4, 2009
Location
Brandon Mississippi
/begin rant

So. Yesterday i had to completely wipe and format Windows 7. On a Toshiba. For the third time. Yet again. (This is the fourth Toshiba that's gotten screwed up somehow for the third time, SINCE WINDOWS 7 CAME OUT)

My girlfriend's Toshiba has a bad audiocard. My best friend's toshiba(s) all have various problems. Bad fan, bad RAM, bad HDD, etc. One of my friends brought me a Toshiba that i'm pretty sure has a failing CPU. How they pulled that one off is beyond me. Noticed it was running hot. Thought "Shouldn't be hard to clean the fan out, right?."

An hour and 80 screws later, i had a small tiny peak at the fan. Toshiba isn't like normal laptops. Had to pull the ENTIRE TOP CASE OFF to get to a portion of the fan. Said "screw it" and got some canned air and blew in the fan from every angle i could, and called it a day and put the thing back together.

I hate Toshiba. I hate Toshiba. I hate Toshiba. I hate Toshiba. I hate Toshiba. I hate Toshiba. Did i mention i hate Toshiba?

/end rant
 
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Yeah, the few people I know with Toshiba laptops loath them. Nothing but problems. One had a laptop that the CPU fan would sit at 100%, even with the cpu at idle and wasn't even warm by laptop standards. With another, the BIOS wouldn't recognize the hard drive half the time. My Dad was just in the market for a new laptop and one of the few pieces of advice I gave him was avoid them like the plague.
 
Like many manufacturers today, Toshiba makes some great products (such as the Portege line) and some products that are pure crap (such as the Satellite line).

The convertible tablet in my sig is the third of the M-series tablets I've owned (M-400, M-700, M780). I upgrade each time a new version comes out. All of the others were sold to customers and are still going strong today with no problems whatsoever.

My current Toshiba M780 has circled the globe several times, working flawlessly after banging around on the back of elephants in the Golden triangle and after being thrown about on trains in Europe. It never misses a beat and is used all day, every day, for heavy multi-tasking (creative content development and programming) in the open salt air at 28-30C.

The Portege line is on par with Lenovo X, T and R-series and Panasonic toughbooks in terms of quality, reliability and longevity. We sell 5-10 of the Portege series per year, on average and have yet to hear a single complaint.

Notebook service takes a great deal of patience and perseverance. I typically tear down 2-3 per week to the motherboard to fix various hardware problems. As far as service difficulty, I rate Toshiba notebooks about average, but still above HP and Sony, which I'd rate as the most difficult, on average. Lenovo takes the top honors for easy-to-work-on notebooks, with intuitive design and excellent online step-by-step manuals.

Generally, business-class notebooks are far better built than consumer-class notebooks and will last much longer with far fewer problems. If anything should be avoided "like the plague", it should be consumer-class notebooks. Especially those from Toshiba, HP, and Dell.
 
I do agree that HP's consumer class junk is just that: junk. Dell has gotten better at Notebook manufacturing lately, and you have a good point about the Satellite line. I've always been stuck fixing them. I haven't had any issues with their other lines come to think of it.

As for the fan mess, usually when i open up a notebook, the fan is easy to access for cleaning. Pull either the top or bottom cover (or keyboard) off, and then sometimes it will require pulling the HS assembly off, and then everything can be cleaned easily. I've never seen a notebook where the entire motherboard would have to be pulled out to add a WWAN card or a WLAN card or to get the fan out/cleaned except for a Toshiba.
 

I wonder what it's like 3 years down the road? :shrug: Funny thread, BTW, Thidy (read entire thread for maximum irony) :facepalm:.

I've never seen a notebook where the entire motherboard would have to be pulled out ... to get the fan out/cleaned except for a Toshiba.

I just worked on a Lenovo X61 yesterday, and access to the HSF requires motherboard removal. Manual here; please refer to p102.

That said, Lenovo manuals (as evidenced) are top-notch, carrying on the traditions of their forebears, IBM.
 
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My Qosmio x305 q705 has been nearly flawless. Bought it two years ago and otger than upgrading to win7 and replacing TIM, its completly stock.
 
My wife got a Satellite while she was in school and it was not very good. It was meant to be a budge computer but still. From the layout (all vents directly on the bottom) to the power plug which was worked on by me, until, I soldered the wire directly to the motherboard.

I too, would rather have the plague than have to deal with that thing again.
 
we have a Satellite that worked so-so for several years until we tried to upgrade to Win 7. Flashed bios okay and started upgrade and it generated a bios password which left the thing unoperable. We found Toshiba service to be great in that case--turned out to be a documented problem and was warrantied (extended by Toshiba until Dec 2010). For a 3 year computer, Toshiba paid for packaging and express shipping both ways. The only bad part was having to get the machine to an authorized shipper (45 minutes). Machine was back within days. Still had problems upgrading to 64 bit Win 7. Found that the memory--although it would pass Bios test, failed MemTest big time. Replaced. Since then has been a pretty good machine considering.
 
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