Back in April, Tina wrote to me with a complaint about a high-end Toshiba laptop that had so many problems she'd given up on it -- even though she had barely used it. She simply did not have the time to go through the repeated "fixes" Toshiba technical support expected of her when she called to get it working. Though she had spent about $2,000 on this machine, she had already bought another laptop by the time she wrote to me at the Gripe Line.
I, too, had trouble getting her problems resolved and was, in fact, driven to admit defeat. I prefer to resolve complaints before I report on them, but beginning with Tina's letter, I decided to periodically throw a gripe up without intervening and let social media work its own magic. It worked for Tina; shortly after I aired her letter, Toshiba contacted her, sent her a FedEx box to ship her computer in, and promised to fix or replace her computer. The company was true to its word, and she now has a working laptop and did not have to endure another lengthy tech support call.
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Al followed Tina's saga, as he was having a similar problem with a top-of-the-line Toshiba, and he wrote to me recently.
"I also bought a Toshiba laptop about a year ago," he says. "I purchased it at Costco. I want to do video editing on it but it overheats. I have tried two different laptop coolers to no avail. It has two hard drives and I edit using one of them as a source and the other as a destination. With the CPU running at 100 percent for a few hours at a time, this computer gets so hot I could burn myself on it. It also randomly shuts down and won't turn on again until it cools off." Because of this persistent problem, Al can edit only short video clips. "Anything longer causes this to happen every time."
The final straw, though, came when the computer overheated so badly it wouldn't turn on again -- even after it cooled off. Al called Costco for help. "Costco transferred my call to Toshiba," says Al. "There a tech told me I could ship the computer to them or take it to an authorized dealer."
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Isn't the problem with Al's notebook really just trying to put all that stuff into a small space? Desktops with two high power video cards running a cpu at 100% for a few hours are going to get really hot. At least I can throw in a quality CPU fan, efficient power supply, and a few 120cm case fans. Don't buy a notebook if you really need a desktop.
Notebooks are for convenience and can't really be expected to do a good cooling job with a few square inches to blow off heat.