Xiaoniu 小妞

Looking back to when dad bought his laptop I wish I had known what I know now. Toshiba makes crap laptops. No offense dad, but I didn’t know at the time either. They’re basically the Chrysler of laptops; nice and slick looking, but parts always seem to be breaking. At least the thing is under warranty.

So far dad’s laptop has made two trips to Atec Group. The first time (last year?) was for a screen replacement. Lots of weird issues and then boom…nothing. A new screen and a new part of the case later and we’re back in order. At least for a little while

Two weeks ago I brought it back to Atec for another repair. This time the a/c connector was loose/broken and the thing would not charge the battery without some interesting rigging to hold the a/c connect in the right position. I never got it right myself.

Secondly, the damn cursor and focus would jump about the screen for no reason. The first thought might be that your wrist hits the touch pad and move the mouse. Nope. Even when typing softly onto the keyboard with wrists and arms raised above the same problem happened.

Within seconds of arriving I found out that the connector problem was under warranty (it’s an extension since the original warranty has expired) and the keyboard issue will probably go away once they replace the main board. No problem.

Two weeks later the thing is back in my possession and so far so good. I don’t have the charger with me, but I have no reason to doubt that it won’t work. The keyboard thing is gone too. They were even nice enough to charge the battery so I’m taking time to defrag the disk and test to see how well the battery holds its charge. Not bad either. I was expecting disaster, but 20% drain after 1 hour of defrag is not bad.

Back to knowing before you buy. When I first brought the thing in for repair Sue happened to talk with her coworkers about it and they all claimed to have been previous Toshiba laptop owners. Every one of them said the same thing. Avoid Toshiba. Dells are much better. If we had only known. It would have saved plenty of headaches and annoyances.

I think I’ll start calling it the bionic laptop. More parts on this thing have been replaced than parts still original. Other than CPU, memory and hard drive it’s pretty much new yet again. Let us hope this is its last trip to Atec.

Knock on wood, but my laptop is a Dell and it’s been going well for about a year and half. Haven’t even had to reinstall Windows yet. No hardware problems either. Phew.