A laptop hot enough to scald

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.”

Al opted for a dealer to save time. He dropped the computer off at the location the Toshiba tech had suggested and was told it would take a week to 10 days to repair. “After a week,” he reports. “I called and they hadn’t yet had a chance to look at it.” So much for saving time that way. A week later, Al called again and the shop told him his motherboard was fried. They had ordered a replacement from Toshiba and were waiting for the part, they told him.

“The following week, they got the part and installed it,” says Al. “The laptop still wouldn’t turn on. So they guessed it was the video cards (the laptop has two).” Again, the shop ordered the parts from Toshiba. This time the parts were backordered and there was no ETA on when they would arrive. “I called Costco to complain,” says Al, “but there was nothing they could do.”

Eventually, the video cards did arrive and the shop installed them. The computer turned on now, so the shop called Al to come pick it up. “Total time so far with the computer in the shop: 3 1/2 weeks,” reports Al.

After all this time, Al wanted to know what the shop had done to repair the overheating problem. “Nothing,” was the answer. He also noted that one of the keys was missing from the keyboard. Al ignored this damage because he wanted his laptop back. “It was F7 and I rarely use that key,” he says. “Though it was not missing when I dropped it off.”

When he got the computer home, he got back to work editing videos. “Within 30 minutes it got so hot that it shut itself off,” says Al. “So I brought it back to the repair shop. They told me it might take another 10 days,” he says, but it turned into more than that.

“They still have it,” Al told me when he wrote to me. “And they have no idea how to fix it. This was the most expensive Toshiba laptop they had at the time,” says Al. “It had the fastest processor and the fastest and biggest hard drives available. Why did Toshiba put that much power into a laptop if it couldn’t be used?”

The Gripe Line contacted Toshiba on Al’s behalf and got a very quick response.

“I just spoke to Al,” a spokesperson assured me. “He finally got his computer back and it is working — at least for the hour he has used it since getting it back.” Al’s main complaint at this point, according to the spokesperson, was that it took five weeks to get it repaired. “I offered him an extra battery and AC adapter,” the spokesperson told me. “He was happy with that offer.”

Got gripes? Send them to christina_tynan-wood@infoworld.com.