Any Models to Beware of ?

Several Years ago, I went to Best Buy to buy my first Laptop. At that time Toshiba was a leader in the market. I bought a A75-S229 which I thought had every feature that I was looking for at the time. Great brand, all the right features, priced right. Perfect fit, right?

About two months after I got it home and started experiencing spontaneous lock-ups and shut downs, I jumped on a tech forum and found out that the whole line of toshiba computers based on my chassis was poorly designed to cool itself and uniquely well-designed to suck dust into the CPU heat sink. A chassis shorting problem was fixed as part of a class acdtion lawsuit. But the particular design of my laptop required professional service to clean the dust off the CPU heatsink once a year (despite careful and frequent vacuuming)

Otherwise the machine as been pretty reliable but performance has been mediocre, sometimes I think because the machine tends to run pretty hot inbetween cleanings. Overall, I may have done better to go with another model, but who knows? It's only now, after about 7 years starting to show signs of failing.

THis is my round about way of asking: Are there any models out there that are notorious for problems? As I said, the A75 models were so bad, they spwned a class action lawsuit. It appears as though Toshiba has been ranked as one of the most reliable brands so I'd like to stay with this brand but I don't want a repeat woof buying a popular model with fatal flaws.

Right now, I'm thinking about the A505 or L505 line -- they've gotten good reviews from COnsumer reports.

THanks for your insight.

 

Only machine I can think of off the top of my head would have to be the Toshiba Qosmio X205, specifically the model that came with the 8600M GT's in SLI. The 8600M GT/GS, and 8400M GS had a design flaw which caused them to fail after about two years on average. This is because when they heated up, during use, and then cooled down, while off, the solder would expend and contract, and then would crack, causing it to eventually fail.

The X205 was not Toshiba's fault. This was a fault on NVIDIA's part, and that has been supposedly fixed with all their later released GPU's.

As for your question on the A505 and L505 lines, I don't think they have any general flaw which would span the all the models of them that are made. Of course, there is the odd one or two that will break, but this is to be expected with any notebook. I think you can also be assured that by going with a Toshiba you will be less prone to failure than if you went with a notebook from the larger companies like HP, and Acer (Although, HP's Elitebooks are pretty good).

Link: http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/laptop-reliability-survey-asus-and-toshiba-win-hp-fails/

 

In general, I suspect that smaller, more compact laptops and laptops with GPUs might stand a greater chance of being problematic with heat issues – simply because things are more compressed into a smaller space. But your concern is mine as well in that it’s always possible that you may get a model that has a bad cooling system design that won’t surface until later on.

I was about ready to get a system with a GPU just because I wanted to help future-proof the investment, but after thinking about it more, I erred on the side of wanting a system that ran cooler and I’m simply not anticipating needing a GPU (not into that type of gaming or anything else that could benefit from it significantly).

I have an eMachines laptop that fell into that same category of having a design flaw and heat issues and resulted in a class action suit. I got lucky and stumbled across the information early on and was able to clean and maintain the machine myself to where it’s still going strong over six year later. Because of this, I’m going to try and keep a pulse on other’s experience with my new p-500 over its lifetime as well.