re: THE Laptop Thread: Configs, deals and questions Hi,
Thought of sharing the dreadful experience I had with the laptop I bought recently. About 6 months back, I bought the top of the line Toshiba A660-07U laptop. It has an I7-740M processor, 4 GB RAM and 640 GB harddisk. Over the last 6 months, to call the experience a nightmare would be an understatement. After a month since purchase, the laptop would start to crash. On atleast 3 occasions in the last 6 months, I had to do a recovery to factory settings, each time I stand to lose significant amount of data. As recent as last week, it completely collapsed again, and this time, the recovery also won't work. I took it to the service station and they have clearly pointed it out that the Hard disk was faulty, which has been causing the issue all along. At this point, I refused to take the laptop back and posed a few questions to them, for which I got no answers but excuses. When I confronted them on how they can repay for the lost data, they started off giving lame excuses like "you should always take back-ups" etc. My argument is, if I have to take a back-up on a daily basis, then what for is the 640 GB of a hard disk?
Toshiba is no exception really. Of late, all the companies are indulging in cheap and inefficient manufacturing practices, which often comes from China, a place where quality control is literally non-existant and leave the customers at the mercy of warranty. As long as you are covered, you are safe. Not really so, because you still end up losing data. The business practice has changed to spending on building quality product to keeping the prices low to attract more customers. If there is a failure, we can fix it post-sales under warranty. If warranty expires, then the company stands to cover all it's expenses incurred in fixing the thing up.
My dad bought the first laptop in family, an IBM R31 in 2001. 10 years since, it is still working, not a single thing, including the battery has changed. It had to be junked because it ran on a Pentium 2. When we sold it, we got 2000 bucks for that. 5 years back, I bought a compaq, which keeps running till date with no issues at all.
Cut to current day, it is only the business series of the laptops that are build to last, when quality control and premium material is used by the companies - they also cost more than the home entertainment series laptops. supplying poor quality and failure of a business laptop often means that there is a million dollar contract at stake for the company, so, they serve the best to the business.
The lesson learnt is to stick to the business series laptops if we need to eek out decent life and ensure no failure of the machine. While it may mean compromising on not having the big Mhz, GB numbers, but, for a slight slowness, you have better assurance of important data and information safety.
Just to highlight the damages I have had - 6 months of photography work - Gone. My daughter's first birthday photos - Gone. Videos of my other daughter right from her birth - Gone. Such a shame that I cannot reverse time back to get these fond memories back. And no nonsense of back-ups please. If someone is selling me a 640 GB of a hard disk, I would tend to believe it is 640 GB of usable hard disk - Not a flimsy peice of thrash that needs to be backed up every other day. It is not that I don't, I take back-ups on a monthly basis - That is not an excuse for pushing cheap stuff to a paying customer.
Bad on you Toshiba, really bad.
Cheers
Prasad |