Do not purchase U200 Toshiba laptop

Here is what happened to me:

1. Bought the laptop about 3 months ago with the standard 1 year warranty.
2. We had not even traveled with the laptop yet since we received it.
3. The only thing is that when we go to the office we used to leave it plugged in.
4. After I checked the email in the morning and later on when opened the same laptop that was working in the morning the bottom half of the screen(LCD) was all white.

So naturally I called toshiba customer service and they told me to take it to a certified repair center. The repair center looked at the laptop, there are no scratches/dent or nothing and they told me, there is a crack in the LCD from inside. So naturally I was surprised how could this happen as there were no scratches/ no dents/ no one placed any heavy object on the top. So the technician told toshiba has this policy that the physical, accidental cracks in the LCD are not supported by the warranty. But I told him, there were no accident, no signs of external scratches/dents and so on and this is a defective product. The local technician told me yeah this is a subjective call and asked me to deal with toshiba directly. So after waiting 2 hrs for each 'customer relations' each time they were very adament the crack is not covered and I told them so if your warranty does not support a 'defective' product what does it support? So the customer relation department said this is not defective and trying to tell me I did this or I must have some accident, then I told them if there are any signs such as scratch/dents and so on I would agree but that is not true. Then I told them the local technicians were surprised to see the crack that way, then I conferenced them and when they talked with them the technician told them 'he cannot definitely say if it is accident or defective' so he asked them to ge the laptop from me and send it to their depot repair and evaluate it by themselves. Then I sent the laptop via UPS to them and their depot repair is failing to provide me a written statement saying this is due to accident or physical activity from outside although they are claiming that verbally and they are not willing to accept it's a defective product.

So Toshiba is not going to fix my laptop which is under their 1 year standard warranty.

So basically with my experience I would ask no one to purchase their products with that confidence of 1 year warranty cause it really does not cover for anything. It's useless, I wish there was a way to reject this warranty and have the consumer payless or instead buy a diff warranty that does cover something.

It looks like I should have done more research and bought other laptops from other companies with good customer service and better warranty policies.

I am sure some of you toshiba owner might be very happy but my experience differ.

 

it's not just toshiba, every manufacturer is going to give you the same run-around with a broken lcd. it's the single most expensive component in most notebooks.

you can break an lcd by just pressing hard on the back cover, leaving no signs of trauma on the notebook. are you the only one that had physical access to the laptop?

 

Well during that time yes.
Check my email in the morning and closed the laptop.
Both the person in the household went to work together and came back together in the evening and I opened the laptop and it was broken.

So then, if lcd can be broken by pressing them on the top then I definitely think U200's design is not good at all, cause I have another laptop from work which is a dell, basically both the laptop that I have are handled the same, and on top of that the dell laptop travels from work to home but toshiba always remained at home since we purchase it. I have had the dell for about 7-8 months and nothing has happened and toshiba I have had it only for 3 months.

So my point of this post is consumers should know that toshiba laptop U200 is weak and the customer service that they gave was really bad.

If you look at the warranty it's weakly written to fool the general customer.

 

Computer Manufacturers these days in general do nothing but screw around with consumers -> hence the ridiculous turn around times at times, the busting of one's laptop at the depots without admittance, etc.

You think they do this with corporate customers? Heck No!
After buying 2 laptops in the past of various manufacturers - I learnt my lesson buying the 3rd.

Manufacturers in general DO NOT care about regular consumers - through their tech support run-arounds to the outright lying. Why do you think they all have a 14-30 day return policy? They already have your $$ - so they RUN!

The only sensible & safest thing one can do is actually purchase from somewhere reputable that cares about the customer and *knows your name after your purchase - like Costco for instance

They have a 3 month money back return policy in the US, while it's 6 months here in Canada

Main reason why I bought my recent laptop from them - No craptacular Tech Support, no more haggling and playing around, it either works in the next couple months properly or it doesn't

- Jordan

 

You are abosolutely right.

I think if there are other customers who have faced such issue with these companies, their policies and so on should write their concern here and it will help the regular buyers like me, you and the future ones.

So my advice is not to buy laptops from Toshiba at all for all the future buyers.