Tecra A7 cracked in the corner?

I'm in a program at school that requires us to lease crappy laptops (at some stupidly high fee)...in turn, I now get to deal with the Tecra daily. We deal with AutoCAD on a daily basis..and it objects on just about all of ours on a daily basis.

Since September, MY "lease" has had its hard drive replaced (Boot Volume Error..stupid blue screen), CTRL key fixed and had it's USB ports on the right side fixed. The bottom left corner always seemed to pop out after that..I'd push it back in and no worries (or so I thought).

So, I pull it out of my bag last night and it's got an awesome looking crack about 2 inches long on the corner. We signed contracts saying that we void our warranty (and deposit of $500 bucks...not that we don't pay $1700 a year for the stupid thing before the deposit) if we had anyone besides the school tech's work on it. I took it in, they yelled at me for not bringing it in when the side was popping out. Essentially said the only way to do this was to drop it. Honestly, if I was going to drop it, I'd throw it off a bridge and make sure there was nothing left of it. It wasn't dropped. I treat it pretty well due to my hopes I get my $500 back (it's an all or nothing thing..they don't adjust for damages, they just take it all).

I suppose I'm looking for a way to fix this without them knowing or suggestions as to why this even happens?? Has anyone seen this before? (if you'd like, I can post pictures) They didn't write anything down when I took it in, so they'll forget about it in a week anyways. I have no problem paying to have the top replaced or something (of which I'm pretty sure will be less than $500)...what are my options?

Thanks in advance.

 

Very common problem, unfortunately.
The Tecra A7 is a flawed product, which Toshiba fails to address except continually repair it under warranty and eventually queitly replace it with A8's and A9's when you complain hard enough.

Several known problems with A7's are:
CTRL key not working
Crack in hinges
Crack in PCMCIA card slot
Failing USB ports
Failing keyboard

I'm surprised there is no class action lawsuit against Toshiba for this model. I presume it's because they didn't sell as well as the HP, Dell or Lenovo business notebooks anyway.

We've seen countless A7's failing with the same faults throughout 2005 and 2006 (the 2 years it was in production before the A8 is quickly made to replace it).