
Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me - barhum
http://bandyt.site44.com/toshiba/
======
sergiotapia
You probably aren't familiar with how "guarantees" work here in South America,
ugh.

See companies like Samsung and Toshiba have "certified" stores that "take
guarantees" but they are not tied by their parent company, they are privately
owned stores that just negotiated with the parent company to use their
"sticker".

I bought a Phillips shaver and under warranty, the Phillips station wanted me
to pay 70% of the cost of a new one, despite being a DoA device.

So while the sticker works as it should in the US and Europe, South America
has a god damn wild west scenario. Anything goes, and if you don't like it,
buy something else. Yep.

(Source: I live in Bolivia)

~~~
dguaraglia
Yup, that's the case in both Argentina and Brazil too. But then, customer
service sucks pretty much at every level. In the US you can buy a product from
Walmart, use it for a couple weeks and if you aren't happy with it just
return/exchange it (and yes, you get your money back, not some store credit.)
Coming from Argentina, I was amazed the first time it worked and felt like I
was ripping someone off. After a while I got used to the idea that _that_ is
how customer service should work.

~~~
lambda
Some people do abuse this to rip companies off, to varying degrees; I know
some people who treat returns as free rentals, buying something, using it
without ever intending to keep it, and then returning it. Some people go even
further and steal things and then return them for cash.

But I guess that on the whole, the good customer experience for the honest
customers outweighs the cost of fraud.

~~~
sillysaurus2
EDIT: My apologies. It looks like I'll need to have a discussion with my
friend about this.

~~~
tedkalaw
Regarding returning things without a receipt:

Once upon a time, it used to be possible to get Bing points by playing a bunch
of stupid games on Club Bing - you could accumulate at most 1000 per day,
unless there was some sort of modifier (like "double ticket day") site-wide.
The prizes available for these points were usually older Microsoft products
like old games (9.99USD), kitchen appliances, hammocks, cheap headphones, etc.
The biggest prizes were Zunes, Vista, Microsoft Office, and the XBox360 Arcade
Edition. As I recall, the XBox required some crazy amount of points and thus
wasn't worth it...and Vista and Office are hardly sexy items. You could win at
most one of each prize per physical mailing address.

The games that you played to win points were flash games, so a bunch of bot
writers automated this. They'd register multiple accounts and try to max out
the number of points they could get per day. Since users had multiple
accounts, people would maintain different amounts of points to save for the
big ticket items. I believe that Office and Vista were in the 50,000 to
100,000 point range. (Side note: Microsoft was slow, but they DID actually
deliver - I got a 360 controller for free!) There are forums dedicated to
"opportunities" like these.

So, what do you do with a free copy of Vista Ultimate? Well, one day a user
who had exhausted all of the other prizes tried going to Best Buy with his
copy. He went to customer service, in-store, and said "Hey, my grandmother got
me this for my birthday. I already have it. Is there any way you could
possibly help me out?"

Can you guess what they did? They gave him $450 in Best Buy credit.

For awhile, the overarching Club Bing metagame was to simply farm Vista
Ultimate, go to a different Best Buy, and "return" your copy. And, on top of
that, someone discovered that Microsoft's shipping treated "123 N. Fake Street
Apartment A" and "123 N. Fake Street Apartment Z" (and, for that matter, "123
N. Fake Street Apartment AAAA") as unique addresses - so it became possible to
have multiple copies of Vista Ultimate shipped to your house. At one point
there were so many Club Bing copies of Vista Ultimate floating around that you
could go on forums and purchase it directly for $100 because botters had
exhausted their local return options.

~~~
quotequad
So those pitiful statistics on Vista usage were -- inflated?

------
nulagrithom
Doesn't look like it's just a misprinted warranty card to me:

[http://support.toshiba.com/warranty](http://support.toshiba.com/warranty)
[http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501085010_web.pdf)
[http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501086010_web.pdf)
[http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501089010_web.pdf)
[http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501089010_web.pdf)
[http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501082010_web.pdf)

That'd be a mistake across warranty docs between 1 and 5 years. Also some
other products:

[http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gma501168010_web.pdf)
[http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gmaa00362010_web.pdf)
[http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/st...](http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/support/pdf_files/stdwar/gmar00008010_web.pdf)

Seems a little odd though that support would go with an excuse like that. Is
there more to the story?

~~~
deadslow
Either there is more to this story, or the OP went to one illiterate customer
care guy. OP should go and show them the official website and maybe make
him/her talk to a customer care executive over phone.

~~~
barhum
I talked to one call center in India and then I had to speak to the Latin
America call center. They all said the same thing.

~~~
rjuyal
Rather mail to Toshiba and raise grievance. I see these days company responds
better if you tweet against them. Just try it.

~~~
vesnalorem
Twitted to Asus about Zenbook ux32vd that screen died 5x and still in warranty
(comes back from repair, works sometimes a month, dies). No answer there.
Maybe they are dead. Couse they are not repairing it eater... And Asus support
is not support. It's customer avoidance.

------
anigbrowl
Manuel Diaz is the head of Toshiba Sales & Marketing for Latin America:
[https://plus.google.com/105717227635873644097/about](https://plus.google.com/105717227635873644097/about)
[http://www.linkedin.com/pub/manuel-
diaz/4/862/644](http://www.linkedin.com/pub/manuel-diaz/4/862/644)

Make a nice _polite_ blog post with all of your documentation (including your
sales receipt) and then send the link to him.

~~~
monkeyspaw
This seems like an immensely useful service (looking up executive level social
media accounts). Are there companies out there who provide this service?

~~~
dsl
Fuck everything about that. No.

I work at a big company and get sales, marketing, press, and customer
inquiries ALL THE TIME, at my PERSONAL email address (which is easier to find
than my work address). There is absolutely nothing I can do to help you if you
contact me directly because company policy forbids it, official channels exist
for a reason.

~~~
wpietri
That's fine as long as official channels work. But too often, "official
channels" is "the mechanism by which we ignore everybody".

If a company suffers from people contacting the wrong people, I think the
solution is to make it easier to contact the right people.

~~~
phaus
Are you an executive? At a lot of companies executives can safely ignore
company policies at their discretion.

Also, you could just inform the customer to resend the info to the official
channel and make sure someone is actually keeping an eye out for it.

------
x0054
I purchased Toshiba laptop in 2002. Within 3 months the laptop's graphics card
failed. Toshiba does not repair their own laptops, rather they send it out to
some 3rd party repair center. The repair center took 3 weeks to repairer the
laptop. When I came back to pick it up, the laptop started but the screen
turned off as soon as I picked it up from the counter. I left it with the
relier center. 2 weeks later they called again. This time it worked for a day
before dying again. 3rd time they took another 3 weeks to repair. After that
it worked for a month and died. I gave up and got a new laptop. Since then I
never purchase Toshiba. I don't care how good or bad their products are, their
customer service is one of the worst.

~~~
Casseres
> I gave up and got a new laptop.

Hopefully for free. Most states have a lemon law.

------
mbijon
I'll add another Toshiba support horror-story. It's why I haven't even looked
at Toshiba products in 2-3 years:

My work laptop (supplied by employer) was a Toshiba and had a 1-year warranty.
After about 10-11 months of using it, the DVD drive stopped working. Toshiba's
warranty support was typical ship-to-depot, so IT pulled the drive and sent
the laptop off for repairs. I wouldn't ordinarily care about a laptop our for
repair, but IT supplied me with a temporary machine that was at least a
generation back (ie: slow and heavy).

IT got a message that except that my machine had been received at the depot
but heard nothing else for weeks and weeks after. By the time I'd bugged a
tech at my company enough to contact them the warranty had lapsed ... and
Toshiba refused to service the machine.

Toshiba refused to service it for several more weeks. I finally took over
contacting support from the IT tech, and got the machine serviced after a
half-dozen (long hold-time) calls. But for the amount of time the IT dept & me
spent getting an optical drive fixed our company could have paid for two new
machines.

------
davidw
I've had good luck with Dells from that point of view. I've bought 3 in the
US, and two, at some point in their lifetimes, have needed some love from a
technician (bad HD, and a cosmetic problem with a very new laptop that I
wanted fixed because I spent quite a bit on it). Despite being very much not
in the US anymore, they promptly dispatched people on site (in Innsbruck,
Austria, and Padua, Italy) to fix the problems with no questions.

(Edit: by the way, most recent one was one of these - nice dev machine if you
like Linux!
[http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd)
)

~~~
csense
You got overcharged.

I got a laptop from Newegg for ~$700-$800 with an i7, nVidia GPU, and Windows
license. Installing Linux is easy enough, and dual booting gives you
flexibility if you want/need to run apps that refuse to go in Wine.

To be fair, my machine only came with 4GB of RAM and no SSD, but upgrades for
those can surely be found for less than the $400-$500 price differential.

And a system with no discrete GPU is crippled if you're a gamer. If I'm paying
$1000 plus for a system, you can be sure it'll have a decent GPU.

~~~
aferreira
To be honest there's a lot more that factors in when you're buying a computer
for business. It's not just the CPU and GPU that come with it, there's a
plethora of other factors that may be important to the buyer, such as:

* Maximum ram upgrade amount (most consumer laptops max out at 8 GB or 16 GB)

* Screen quality (IPS vs TN, glare vs anti-glare, etc)

* Keyboard layout and quality (yes, this matter A LOT if you type all day on the computer)

* Driver compatibility (since Linux is mentioned)

* Weight, roughness (or beat-up factor), portability factors, battery life, modularity, expansion ports... the list goes on.

It's not just "this machine which has a top end Intel i7 CPU and an SSD" for
everyone.

~~~
davidw
For me the screen is the most important thing. Pretty much anything these days
is 'fast enough' for what I need if it's got enough memory. I was a bit
disappointed, infact, in the HD screens these days - my old one was 1920x1200,
rather than the new one with 1920x1080.

------
nickjamespdx
After a serial number lookup, it appears that this Toshiba laptop's warranty
expired in Feb. of 2013.

This is using the s/n in the image:
[http://bandyt.site44.com/toshiba/garantia2.jpg](http://bandyt.site44.com/toshiba/garantia2.jpg)

Results of the s/n search: (from site:
[http://support.toshiba.com/warranty](http://support.toshiba.com/warranty))

Model Name: SATELLITE C850D Product Category: Portable Model-Part Number:
PSCBQU-00200F Serial Number: YC307409Q Registration Number: 827633 Purchase
Date: Nov 26, 2012 Country Purchased: United States Complimentary Phone
Support Through: Feb 24, 2013 Warranty: Warranty expired! +++ Warranty
Expiration Date: Nov 26, 2013 Primary Service Option: Out of Warranty Service
++ [http://toshibarepairservices.com](http://toshibarepairservices.com)

~~~
TillE
> YC307409Q

You entered the wrong serial number. It's YC317409Q.

> Warranty Expiration Date: Feb 24, 2014

~~~
nickjamespdx
You're right, I entered '307' instead.

------
devindotcom
I'm probably with you, but there's not a lot of information here. Where did
you buy it? Could it have been from a dealer that wasn't authorized to issue
this warranty? If they couldn't agree to it on Toshiba's behalf the contract
would be null, right? And what is the problem with the laptop - though that is
of course a separate question from that of honoring the warranty.

~~~
barhum
Bought it from Amazon.com directly Feb 19

~~~
JoshTriplett
Have you tried contacting Amazon's customer service about this? Get _them_ to
either enforce the warranty or replace the laptop themselves.

~~~
barhum
Amazon has always been good with me but I am past the 30 day policy to return
it them. Anyways it is Toshiba's reponsibility...

~~~
tombrossman
TL/DR: Have Amazon handle this for you, they are awesome at customer service.

I had a one year old HTC Desire which malfunctioned under warranty (Europe
here = 2yrs mandatory) and sought to return it to them for repair. They were a
huge pain in the ass, refusing to pay shipping to the repair depot despite
this being explicitly covered, and so I asked Amazon (from whom I bought it)
for assistance dealing with HTC. Totally shocked when Amazon told me 'No
problem, here's a free shipping label, send it back to us for a full refund.
The price was hundreds of pounds less by then and they refunded the original
price. It was in pretty good shape but not at all in 'like new' condition. I
immediately bought another from them and kept the difference - they weren't
interested in just exchanging it.

Fast forward to now, and it's pretty much the same deal with LG and a
defective Nexus 4. LG agreed in writing to reimburse shipping prior to me
sending it, but now want to change the terms & added an NDA and are illegally
withholding payment[1] of their debt. I contacted Amazon again and they told
me the same deal: 'Send it in for a full refund any time, no problem'.

Needless to say, I now buy all electronics on Amazon. This is probably their
goal and we're both okay with it. As for HTC and LG, at least in the UK, they
are bastards and I'll keep hoping for better support from other manufacturers
when I can.

[[https://twitter.com/tombrossman/status/418003090059448322](https://twitter.com/tombrossman/status/418003090059448322)]

~~~
danieldk
_TL /DR: Have Amazon handle this for you, they are awesome at customer
service._

They are. We once purchased a PS3 controller from Amazon Marketplace. It
turned out to be a counterfeit, but we didn't notice until 3/4 year later when
Sony disabled many counterfeit controllers. We contacted Amazon to warn about
this seller. They didn't only remove the seller from Marketplace, they also
gave us a full refund.

------
kwiens
Toshiba has been aggressive at limiting DIY repairs as well. They sent Tim
Hicks a takedown notice forcing him to remove service manuals from his site:
[http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/cease-and-desist-
manual...](http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/cease-and-desist-manuals-
planned-obsolescence/)

------
cabinguy
I'm sorry to hear that you are having this problem. After buying/selling
10,000+ used laptops (every brand imaginable) over many years, I personally
purchase and recommend only Toshiba laptops. Take it for what it's worth.

~~~
barhum
Most brands are made in Foxcon anyways. I think it is the support and service
that makes the brand.

~~~
cabinguy
I can't speak to the support/service (which seems to be lacking here). I'm
just saying they were, by far, the most reliable machines we bought/sold.

~~~
RankingMember
This has been my experience as well. Bought a Satellite A205 that got left
near a window in the rain, so got all wet on the back. Wiped it off, let it
dry, and it was fine. It's been through hell and back over the past 5 years
and is still kicking. Recommended them to my family and they're all still
operating fine years later.

This is not to say whether or not their service sucks- I've just never needed
to interact with their service department.

~~~
omerhj
I've got a Toshiba Satellite 320CDT (Pentium 233MMX, 96 MB RAM) from 1998 that
still runs -- I installed Debian Wheezy on it last November. Toshiba went
through a really bad spell a few years later, but now their machines don't
seem much less reliable than HP or Dell's consumer laptops.

------
endgame
After buying a Toshiba Satellite P100-J01 years ago, and having to choose
between either sound or ACPI when running GNU/Linux (until a BIOS update came
out, and even then I had to patch the DSDT), I'll never buy Toshiba again.

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-
source-2.6.2...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-
source-2.6.22/+bug/136469)

------
psibi
Okay, I must say the situation depends.

I bought a Toshiba laptop previously and accidentally lots of water got leaked
into it. (was my mistake)

The system didn't reboot at all. They entirely replaced my RAM and other
hardware components free of cost. This happened in India. So I guess the
situation varies.

~~~
barhum
I can see that happening but in this case I am screwed..

------
deadslow
Yet another bad-after-sale-support story. Why is this on HN? If you go stand
at _any_ laptop brand service centre, you'll hear 50 such stories everyday.

~~~
whatevsbro
Because it's good for people to know that Toshiba sucks, so that they can
avoid buying their products.

------
prehkugler
If you purchased this with a credit card, you may be able to use the card's
warranty. Many credit cards come with an extended warranty service and dispute
resolution/fraud protection as a customer incentive (in addition to their
points/frequent flier miles/whatever). Even if this is not covered under your
card's extended warranty, talking with your credit card company may allow you
get the charges reversed.

------
benatkin
Please don't tell me what to do. Every one of Toshiba's major competitors do
things that are wrong and fail to own up to them.

It would take a lot more than this to get me to avoid a company as large as
Toshiba.

~~~
barhum
So if other companies are worse does that excuse another of doing wrong?

~~~
freehunter
There would be very few companies to buy things from if we stopped doing
business with every company that has ever had a complaint against them.

~~~
barhum
I just want my laptop fixed. Once they fix it I would gladly remove
everything. Sadly this is the only way to get their attention.

~~~
differentView
I was with you until I saw this comment. If everything you've stated is true,
why not keep what you have up and just add an update to how Toshiba fixed your
laptop?

~~~
barhum
You are right...I will

------
sarreph
This is perhaps the best and most tech-influential spot you can gain to
advertise an issue you're having with a company/product.

However, I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody at Toshiba visits HN.

------
sasv_victim
Sorry you have to face this annoyance!

I had a similar problem with top-end ultrabook from ASUS (13.3" FHD i7 Zenbook
Prime with discrete graphics) in 2012.

The ultrabook stopped after 2.5 months (keyboard problem), then after RMA got
update that it was a customer induced damage (definitely not, it was an issue
many people complained about) requiring replacement of both keyboard and
motherboard almost for the price of a new ultrabook. I was really upset and
after 6 months of having it in a drawer I sent the ultrabook for an analysis
to an independent lab - it turned out only the keyboard module was damaged,
motherboard was OK. I ordered a keyboard replacement from asusparts (~$100)
and it works till today. Never heard any sorry from ASUS for trying to extract
money from me for a "damaged" motherboard.

Having said that, I scratched ASUS off my list for the rest of my life. This
happened in Germany. Paradoxically I was just thinking about buying Toshiba
Qosmio X70-136 as my DTR but after reading this I will go with some Clevo-
based manufacturer like. Thanks!

------
undoware
As a Canadian I deplore this apparent policy. I'm not sure why Toshiba has
introduced it, but it wouldn't surprise me if there is difficulty warding off
warranty fraud under certain legal systems. Like, those legal systems your
lawyers don't know. (You fired the international lawyers as a corner-cutting
move, remember?)

------
incredimike
Hey man. I can't figure out how to direct message you. I contacted Toshiba via
twitter and asked for a comment. They said they would investigate. You may
want to contact them directly.

Support says they've passed the matter to "customer service mgmt. Expecting a
response on Monday."

These dudes: @ToshibaUSAhelp

~~~
barhum
Thank you Mike! I saw your comment on twitter!

------
rmason
When you buy online you need to investigate what happens before you need
service. A consumer might not need to go to the effort but for a programmer a
good laptop is a tool.

Years ago I bought Dell's and found paying extra for their onsite service was
a wise investment. Only needed it for a single machine but they literally came
to our office with parts and repaired it. Until I needed it a second time and
found they had changed policies and found onsite was in name only.

So when I started buying Toshiba Qosmio's I actually investigated my service
options in Michigan. It has paid dividends because whenever I've had a problem
I can get on the phone with the company's owner, they turn it around faster
than shipping it to Toshiba's depot and keep me informed every step of the
way.

------
ivanhoe
Oh, yes, Toshiba's support sucks, especially if you live outside US and EU. My
Qosmio laptop was constantly overheating in summers, power adapter got broken
twice (and on one of those occasions literally started burning, smoking and
all melted down), volume control got broken after about 6 months and started
randomly changing the sound volume to max (very scary thing since I often
leave my laptop playing music when I go to sleep)... and each time I would
have to wait for 2-3 weeks for them to "repair" it. And it wasn't cheap at
all, I could easily get Apple MBP for that money (which I eventually did)

------
jlund3
I've had bad experiences with Toshiba refusing to honor warranties before.
After hours on the phone it turned out that the reason they wouldn't help me
is because they had recorded my date of birth as the date of purchase and vice
versa. Apparently no one there thought it strange that the laptop had been out
of warranty for more than two decades... The one manager that did understand
the absurdity of the situation still insisted that no one at his call center
had the authority to make the obvious correction. Like the OP, I will never
buy another Toshiba product, and I tell all my friends the same.

------
nyar
I like the Toshiba laptop I got.. but the Toshiba Thrive tablet which came out
at the same time as Xoom has not received any updates! Xoom is on 4.4, Thrive
has been abandoned.

------
MatthewWilkes
So, I don't know about the north/south american systems, but in the UK when a
manufacturer or a store fails to meet their obligations you sue them in small
claims court. I've never heard of a company not settling out of court, they
don't want a precedent set against them and they don't want to fly their
lawyers out to talk about a laptop return for a day.

------
vacri
My own Toshiba experience with Australian support is that they wouldn't even
talk to you unless you paid them $55. I was after a service manual, not
troubleshooting, but I couldn't even get to ask what I wanted unless I paid.
There were a couple of other times I needed to ask for trivial things to
service clients' laptops, but at $55 per question, sod them.

------
danysantiago
I know the feeling! Living in Puerto Rico is a double edge scenario. I might
be fully treated as an US customer with all the benefits or they just don't
consider us a US Territory. Sometimes we are another country somewhere in the
Caribbean, sometimes we get confused with Latin America and then the options
for services just becomes close to none.

------
dustinbrownman
I'm sorry this happened to you, buddy. That really sucks. Us United States
consumers should be more concerned with the shortcuts and backhanded ways
companies deal with customers outside of the States. A company that treats
customers badly just because it CAN instead of doing what it SHOULD doesn't
deserve our business.

------
alanning
This seems like it would be a "truth in advertising" violation. From your
pictures, normal recourse looks like binding arbitration but maybe the truth
in advertising angle can make it a bigger deal. Especially since someone else
pointed out that they have included Latin America in their warranty list for
years.

------
6d0debc071
Called customer service for about 2 hours, they said that they made a mistake
in printing the warranty card and that I would have to pay to repair the
laptop.

\---------------------

Ugg. Too bad for them but I wonder what the small claims court would have to
say about it. Contract is what's advertised, not what you secretly thought.

...

Assuming there is an equivalent there, of course.

------
arcosdev
Toshiba makes crap. Most Windows-based laptops are. I know it sounds
ridiculous, but it still makes more sense to buy a Mac laptop and run Windows
on it. Every time a friend or family member asks me what Windows-based laptop
to buy, I have to tell them to buy a Mac because of shitty situations like
this one.

~~~
ido
The sony vaio ones are pretty good in my experience.

------
late2part
2 Thoughts:

1\. Bill Clinton might say - "Well, it depends on your definition of Latin
America."

2\. You should mail the CEO of Toshiba. In fact, you should give us the
contact info for the CEO of Toshiba so we can mail him on your behalf.

------
scottydelta
They are all the same, trust me, I am facing same on my HP laptop, they say
that they are not responsible for poor battery backup after 2 months of
purchase because I use my laptop excessively!!

------
volune
Latin America is a conceptual region, not a concrete set of countries. They
can probably get away with not honoring the warranty in Guatemala because of
this ambiguous terminology.

~~~
Panoramix
But there are no definitions of Latin America that do not include Guatemala:
a) Former Spanish colonies b) Spanish speaking countries c) Romance language
speaking countries d) Countries South of the USA

------
etler
I've heard plenty of bad things about Toshiba customer support last time I was
looking for a laptop. It's not too hard to find complaints about them.

------
dbs
I guess if toshiba lies in the warranty and does not assume its errors, it
should also lie in other things. Not a good company to do business with.

------
sciguy77
I won a Toshiba in a science competition. Even though it was free it still
sucked, they make terrible little machines.

------
shahzad_76
Site is down due to "excessive usage", couldn't find this in the Google cache
either.

~~~
barhum
fixed it, Thanks!

------
jedmeyers
According to the picture you are going to have to go to arbitration to dispute
this. What a bummer.

~~~
pyre
The good news is that Toshiba probably gets to choose the venue and the
arbiter! What could possibly go wrong?

------
Fjolsvith
I guess I won't buy toshiba at all now. I will also tell my friends to not buy
toshiba.

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Aaronn
4 points and the site is down

~~~
barhum
fixed it! Thanks

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blizzard
I was about to buy toshiba portege laptop. Now I have changed my mind. Thanks!

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lazyant
try calling Toshiba laptop support for North America and press/ask for a
representative in Spanish, they do laptop support for (some?) Latin American
countries out of Mississauga, Ontario

~~~
barhum
I did talk them in Spanish, the manager was the one I spoke to there...

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thatthatis
Did you buy from an authorized retailer?

~~~
barhum
from Amazon.com

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cpncrunch
Website still isn't working...

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rhgraysonii
Hey Moneer. Just wanted to say, I miss you buddy! I hope this all gets sorted
out. Let me know if I can help you in any way.

~~~
barhum
Hey Bobby! Thanks for the support!

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petercoolz
i remember back in college my friends would call them shitobas because they
broke so often

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gwbas1c
Take up the problem with Amazon.

------
dmourati
... in Guatemala

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fuckpig
I haven't since this event:

> In 1987, Tocibai Machine, a subsidiary of Toshiba, was accused of illegally
> selling CNC milling machines used to produce very quiet submarine propellers
> to the Soviet Union in violation of the CoCom agreement, an international
> embargo on certain countries to COMECON countries. The Toshiba-Kongsberg
> scandal involved a subsidiary of Toshiba and the Norwegian company Kongsberg
> Vaapenfabrikk. The incident strained relations between the United States and
> Japan, and resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two senior executives,
> as well as the imposition of sanctions on the company by both countries.[6]
> Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania said "What Toshiba and Kongsberg did was
> ransom the security of the United States for $517 million."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#1939_to_2000](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#1939_to_2000)

~~~
bcoates
The Free World won the war against Communism through economic warfare, surely
Toshiba contributed to that impoverishing them by $517 million of hard
currency for weapons they never got to use?

~~~
frenchy
Not necessarily. That $517 million would very likely have been spent on
attempts to reproduce the technology themselves, not on economic development.

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JSno
Now I understand why people came and coming U.S..

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nodata
I don't know why you are posting this on HN. Anyway you have several options:

1\. Go to the vendor you bought it through

2\. Go to your credit card company

3\. Look up the consumer protection laws of your country and use them

~~~
kahirsch
4\. Warn other consumers from buying Toshiba products.

5\. Shame Toshiba into living up to their word.

~~~
nodata
Apple did exactly the same thing in Europe (worse actually, they lied to make
people buy AppleCare). In China too iirc.

Use your legal rights, and advertise what you did. If you don't know your
rights you'll probably have a bad time.

~~~
lstamour
Not to mention Apple in Australia. That kind of warranty protection is enough
to make me want to move there! ;-)

