Notebook misadventures part 2: Toshiba A250-4612 (or something like that)

Heya,

Now we come to the second part of my notebook misadventures, this time with a Toshiba Satellite.

After I managed to get to refund for my defective HP dv6000, some friends of mine suggested that I should get a Toshiba Satellite. I have had found one with a decent price and a good configuration on a local shop here called KG Info. It was an A250, not sure about the exact model, but it was 46-something. It had 250gb of HD (4200 rpm), 4GB of Ram, C2D 1,66 processor, 15″ wide screen, fingerprint reader, memory stick reader and a 1.3 mp webcam. All nice and dandy.

So, I went to the shop to pickup the notebook and they bought it to me, it was a little odd, instead of the regular blue top with the Toshiba logo, it had a plain dark purple top, which was odd so I asked if there was anything wrong with the Notebook and the vendor told me Toshiba ships some of those like that, but since I tested it and it seemed to be ok (and had a good price) I bought it.

Now, when I got back to use it, I was amazed by their recovery system, which even included the recovery DVD (nowadays you have to record them yourself so the big manufacturer can save a few pennies) that allowed you to set the partition size you want to install the default system, perfect if you also want to install Linux or some other OS.

The system was working perfectly, besides a little something, the Webcam, which I did not tested on the store. So, it turns out the web cam was either “not connected” nor broken. By looking through the USB bus where it was supposed to appear and found nothing. Then a guy at the office arrived with a notebook he bought that was refurbished, and well, it had the same purple top cover, so I called KG Info asking if the notebook they sold me was refurbished, which they denied, saying that they don’t deal with refurbished notebooks and all that. So I decided to call Toshiba to check it, and they told me how to spot a refurbished notebook.

1 – Below the notebook, there’s a sticker with the Serial and Part numbers. It’s supposed to have a sticker on top of it saying it’s a refurbished notebook and the part number is supposed to end with a “b” chracter. Mine didn’t, but there were clearly glue marks on the serial parts, indicating that something was removed.
2 – In case of doubt, go to http://gedb.toshiba.com and enter your Part Number and Serial Number, if it says it doesn’t exist, add a “b” character in the end of your part number
3 – If you had to put a “b” for it to work, you will notice that the manufacturer warranty is only 90d, as in opposed to the 365 day warranty of an actual new one. Therefore your notebook is a refurbished one.

Well, so it was bullshit, I checked and my notebook was refurbished, and they sold me as a new one, they even removed the sticker saying it was refurbished! Plain dishonest if you ask me. So I returned it and they said they would try to get me a new one in 30d, which they didn’t, so they gave me the money back. The reason they couldn’t was clear, the price they were selling was low because it was a refurbished, so if they were to get a real new one to give me by the same price I paid for the refurbished one, they would loose money.

So, to make it short. I KG Info in Curitiba, Brazil (www.kginfo.com.br) sold me a refurbished notebook as a new one, and they refused to admit the fact, saying that it was probably an “error” with their suplier. I don’t buy it, I think they do stuff like that on purpouse, afterall not everyone knows how to differ a refurbished notebook from an actual new one. Not that refurbished notebooks are bad, mine had a problem, yes, but I think they tend to have less problems since they had to be re-reviewed, and people can return notebooks for all sorts of reasons, my problem was KG Info trying to sell one as a new! Which is a bad bad bad bad thing in my book.

I won’t be buying more from this vendor and I do suggest that others don’t unless they are really sure their notebook “is for real”.

Notebook misadventures part 1: HP dv6125BR (dv6000 series)

Hello everyone. Been a long time since I have actually wrote anything in here and this post is about one of the reasons.

My darned HP dv6125BR Notebook that I bought on May 2007 simply decided to not work anymore about six months after I bought him. Which was a shame since despite the hardware/technical support/warranty issues that I am about to related, it worked very well on both Linux and Windows and it had decent specs by the price I bought him for. It was a 15″ wide Semprom 3400 with 512BM DDR2 of ram (which I quickly upgraded to 1GB), 60GB Sata Hard Disk and a nvidia 6120go graphics card. Now, the story:

After a few months of use, I had to make a BIOS upgrade to allow me to set how much memory it would assign for the video card, since by default it was using 256mb, a waste for that video card. Anyway, the updated worked fine, but sometimes the machined failed to turn on totally (although I think that was already happening before and since I saw the same problem on some non-bios-upgraded-laptops I don’t think this was the cause). Basically it would turn up the machine and its fans, but not the LCD and would never get to the POST screen. At first I had to turn it off and back on about 2-3 times to get it booting and working, and it started to get worse everytime, and when it was impossible to turn it on I took it to the repair shop, which took 3 weeks to return the notebook to me, but, it was working so I was pleased.

About 3 weeks after it was returned, the same problem started to appear again, and worse, the machine simply froze all the time for no aparent reason. So I lost my patience and called HP’s helpdesk. They told me that they would need to repair the notebook again and that it would take another 3 weeks for that, but they would give me 2 months of extended warranty and that they would come to my office to get and deliver the notebook, so I figured it was ok to wait a little longer, but then the pain began:

1 – They went to my HOME to pickup the notebook instead of my office as it was agreed upon, on the 3rd week after I had called requesting the support;
2 – When I called HP, they told me that they would have to take another 3 weeks to retrieve the notebook and the attendant there had the nerves to tell me that she could not answer for the person who had oppened the first request wrong and that I would have to follow “the process flow” even though it was not my fault. I was so angry that I told her to screw with it and that I wanted to return the notebook. Which caused her to open another support ticket.
3 – More than two months passed with HP rarely contacting me (they always said they would call me back in X days, but never ever did) and no one being able to inform me of anything. Just waiting with a broken notebook and no money to buy a new one.
4 – After a huge while they returned me the money, which I don’t have anything to complain since they returned it with the corrected values (because of the time that passed) and they took the notebook away.

Now, one would think that I was just unlucky, but there are two different people here at work that bought HP notebooks from the dv6000 series (one in Canada and the other in the US) and they BOTH had hardware issues, one of them having the exact same as mine, so therefore I do not recommend anyone from buying computers from the HP dv6000 series unless they fixed those issues.

So that was a very short summary of my misadventures with my HP notebook, I hope it serves as a lesson for other people. Please note that I am not saying that “HP is bad” or something like that, just that mine and my co-workers experiences with their dv6000 series was very bad.

S.