The high price of 'high-quality' laptop repair
Toshiba customer loses faith in vendor after unexplained failures render his repair bill nearly as high as his sticker price
Follow @infoworldGeorge asks, "If you save up all your hard-earned money to buy what you believe to be a top-of-the-line notebook and it fails just after its warranty period ends, what do you do?"
George, who lives in South Africa, bought a Toshiba Qosmio that failed shortly after its warranty period ended. "When I switch it on, it starts as normal," he explains. "But after about one minute, a window pops up saying there is a heating problem and it should be returned for service. Then it switches itself off."
[ Also on InfoWorld, another customer runs into trouble with her Toshiba laptop. Could it be a disturbing trend? | Frustrated by tech support? Get answers in InfoWorld's Gripe Line newsletter. ]
Not only was this a serious inconvenience for George, it turned out to be only the beginning of his problems.
"I took the machine to my local repair agent and -- after a couple of days -- they faxed me a quote to have it repaired. The price was R 672-60 [about $90]," George says. "I accepted the quote, and the repair shop said it would be available in approximately one week."
But it wasn't ready in a week.
"To cut a long story short," says George. "Almost two months later, I received a revised quote for R 15,427-62 [approximately $2,050]. That is almost the price of a new unit."
George didn't think this was right, so he wrote to the Gripe Line. "I believe it is very unusual for a notebook to fail so prematurely," he says. "And it also seems unusual that Toshiba will not stand behind its product. They almost imply that I was lucky it lasted so long. I tried to raise the matter with Toshiba Japan. But they passed me off to the local agents in South Africa, who say, 'It is Toshiba's practice not to repair a unit, but to replace the insides.' I now have a heap of expensive Toshiba junk lying at home."
I forwarded George's letter to Toshiba and heard back rather quickly. "This is a very unfortunate but isolated incident," explains Eva Heller, media manager and analyst relations manager at Toshiba. "We value our customers highly and take customer concerns very seriously. Our greatest responsibility to our customers is to deliver high-quality products while communicating honestly and openly. We are in the process of investigating this issue to ensure this does not happen again in the future. We will contact our service partner in South Africa and the customer concerned to resolve this issue."
