Toshiba Satellite Pro A100

[pmassingham]

Bought 8 of these for the school last August and now a power supply has failed. After numerous condesending and patronising remarks from their help desk, we now have to send the PS AND THE LAPTOP back as they do not believe that the PS has failed.

I won't touch Toshiba with a barge pole ever again!!

I wouldn't even bother contacting them - would just ring LEA instead.

[laserblazer]

Who did you buy them from. We had some issues with Toshiba over Cashback and Misco were extremely supportive. Between them and their Toshiba rep they sorted it amicably.

[crc-ict]

I've got a number of these, and they're not good are they!? I was very disappointed in them for Toshiba machines, which I always thought were a safe brand for good quality.

I don't think the power supply issue is unusual though - HP made me send a laptop (at their expense) to Poland of all places when the power supply went duff. The silliest thing was, they specifically told me NOT to send the power supply with it!

Fast service though, UPS collected on Tuesday and returned it to me the following Monday, basically untouched, but with a new PSU in the box!

After the experience, I think it's HP for me from now on.

[pmassingham]

I only bought the Toshibas as the cost was lower than buying in more Ergos. We have 180 student laptops and apart from key board abuse, the next big issue is dodgy power connections on the system board. HP worries me generally. We had a failed HP printer - K850 - and after taking a week to even agree that it was still under warranty, it took another week to replace it. Maybe all help desks and technical support are the same? Having said that, I am starting to implement FITS here and having installed a single point of contact for all help requests, the next strep is SLAs. Perhaps these companies could learn something from us!

[mavhc]

We had 12 Toshiba Satellite Pro A10s, about 1.5 years later, within 3 months 10 of the AC adapters failed, sent 2 to toshiba they said they worked, and sent us 2 refurbished ones as well, but wouldn't accept there was a fault with the design or anything. Luckily the AC adapters from some very old toshibas work, so I've used those, they're worth more than the laptops :-)

Since then I've only bought Dell laptops.

[apinnard]

We purchased 35 Satellite Pro A100's to replace old Fujitsu-Siemens E8020's that we got off the LEA a few years back. The Fujitsu's were good workhorses - wicked battery life and very durable. The replacement Toshiba's have been a nightmare:

We have had three that have deveolped a straight green/yellow line down the LCD screen which have needed warranty repair. Three more have had AC adapters that have died, and in general they are falling to bits after only a year. The batteries last a maximum of an hour even with Tosh power saver installed.

All in all there have been about 8 warranty returns out of those 35, and every time Toshiba take two days to send a courier, then we don't see the unit(s) back for another 10 days - 2 weeks plus!

We also purchased 6 Toshiba Sat Pro P100's for the senior leadership team - and all of these have developed cracks along the hinges on the lids. We complained to Tosh who have said we need to send all 6 away for a replacement lid under warranty as it's "a known fault with this model." What a joke.

We have just bought 30 Dell Latitude D530's out of the last of our budget for the year and we are very satisfied with the durability, battery life and build quality. Only time will tell.......

[Oops_my_bad]

In true incompetent style, our LEA have just bought an entire batch of Tosh's for this computers for pupils scheme (a good few hundred)

Oh well they were warned - not only have they wasted taxpayers money on an unsustainable red-herring, they have also blatantly ignored all the advice given to them regarding Toshiba.

[dbrown]

Apropos Toshibas:
Our LEA recommended supplier offers only Toshibas - though will supply other makes if asked.
Just bought their latest offerings A200 and P200. I,ve had no complaints about the A200 yet (only 3mo old). The P200 I would not recommend: battery life has never beaten 2 hrs, even on most miserly settings -typically 1hr; screen is bright, good contrast, but very shiny surface has v.bad reflections; usb sockets are (imo) very badly placed at sides near front - always bashing my mem stik; & minor irritation, LEDs are all same colour (v.bright blue) so not obvious which is which, and positioned at front beaming straight into eyes when using (first upgrade was to glue a piece of paper over LEDs). To be fair, it has worked ok and wireless has been completely troublefree (unlike some other LTs in school.)
We also have:
Toshiba Tecra A3s which have worked fine in classrooms for 18mo. Still batteries ok and no HW problems.
Toshiba SP L100s have been in school <6mo. have worked ok so far, but already half have broken keys (BUT maybe blame users rather than makers.)
Toshiba SP L20s as staff LTs for 2 yrs, generally ok, but have never managed to get dual display clone mode to work. (a pity, since many staff want this for IWBs.)

I need to get some more staff LTs soon, and would welcome any recommendations.

[ianhiseman]

Had a batch of 30 of these delivered in July last year, was september by the time most of them were actually allocated and used. Since then we've had to send 3 back for losing VGA output capability, 1 for keyboard failure, 2 for PSU failure, and one because it just died completely.

The A200's in my opinion are just as bad.

Firstly, they only seem to ship with Vista, which the hardware doesn't handle very well (they are unbelievably slow).
Second, a lot of them don't come out of hibernation so you have to force them to power off.
Third, if you power them on with an ethernet cable connected they often don't even boot.
Fourth, they have a habit of 'losing' the ethernet adapter completely. Sometimes you'll boot the machine and the ethernet adapter is misisng from device manager, you restart and it will be there again (and you'll have to go through 'add new hardware')

We've been using toshibas for years, and apart from the occasional PSU failure we haven't had much trouble. But these recent batches have just been one drama after another. I think we will be looking into HPs in the future!

[markwatkins]

We are, happily, approaching the end of our Toshiba nightmare, we have about 30 which are now out of warranty and so far have written 6 off. When they were in warranty we usually had at least 2 back at Toshiba, usually with psu/vga/port problems they are a nightmare.

We now have circa 100 Ergos and have had for just over a year only 1 has developed a fault and it was back within 2 days, the keyboards do seem to attract fingers and the replacement of the keyboards is a 5 minute job... guess what no more toshibas!!!

[conehead]

The older Toshibas were much better, we still have a number of the Satellite 2100 in use and the A40 was not bad, but things started to go wrong with the A60, power connector centre pins coming out, serious graphic failures and keys like tiddlywinks.

[iatkinson]

Originally Posted by Oops_my_bad

In true incompetent style, our LEA have just bought an entire batch of Tosh's for this computers for pupils scheme (a good few hundred)

Oh well they were warned - not only have they wasted taxpayers money on an unsustainable red-herring, they have also blatantly ignored all the advice given to them regarding Toshiba.

Ditto, I've had nearly 90 to deal with this yeare and looks like the same again next year.