Top-Notch Laptop Repair? Expect to Pay Top Dollar

George asks, "If you save up all your hard-earned money to buy what you believe to be a top-of-the-line notebook and it fails just after its warranty period ends, what do you do?"

George, who lives in South Africa, bought a Toshiba Qosmio that failed shortly after its warranty period ended. "When I switch it on, it starts as normal," he explains. "But after about one minute, a window pops up saying there is a heating problem and it should be returned for service. Then it switches itself off."

[ Also on InfoWorld, another customer runs into trouble with her Toshiba laptop. Could it be a disturbing trend? | Frustrated by tech support? Get answers in InfoWorld's Gripe Line newsletter. ]

Not only was this a serious inconvenience for George, it turned out to be only the beginning of his problems.

"I took the machine to my local repair agent and -- after a couple of days -- they faxed me a quote to have it repaired. The price was R 672-60 [about $90]," George says. "I accepted the quote, and the repair shop said it would be available in approximately one week."

But it wasn't ready in a week.

"To cut a long story short," says George. "Almost two months later, I received a revised quote for R 15,427-62 [approximately $2,050]. That is almost the price of a new unit."

George didn't think this was right, so he wrote to the Gripe Line. "I believe it is very unusual for a notebook to fail so prematurely," he says. "And it also seems unusual that Toshiba will not stand behind its product. They almost imply that I was lucky it lasted so long. I tried to raise the matter with Toshiba Japan. But they passed me off to the local agents in South Africa, who say, 'It is Toshiba's practice not to repair a unit, but to replace the insides.' I now have a heap of expensive Toshiba junk lying at home."

I forwarded George's letter to Toshiba and heard back rather quickly. "This is a very unfortunate but isolated incident," explains Eva Heller, media manager and analyst relations manager at Toshiba. "We value our customers highly and take customer concerns very seriously. Our greatest responsibility to our customers is to deliver high-quality products while communicating honestly and openly. We are in the process of investigating this issue to ensure this does not happen again in the future. We will contact our service partner in South Africa and the customer concerned to resolve this issue."

Last I checked, George was not yet a happy Toshiba customer, though someone from Toshiba had contacted him with the hope of getting his laptop working. The service representative offered him a price for the repair of R 8,204-12 excluding the European VAT tax [about $1,000]. George calculates the cost to him for this repair to be about R 9,352-70 [$1,250].

"Toshiba is asking me to pay (including the original price) R 30,564-00 (over US$4,000) for a notebook which may have a faulty design," he says. "The company has never offered any reason for the original failure. So I am naturally skeptical about replacing its motherboard only to have the failure repeat itself after a similar period. Toshiba should state the reason for the failure and offer me some assurance as to why it will not happen again."

At this point, George is completely disillusioned. "I never expected this kind of treatment from Toshiba," he says, after committing such a large amount of money to purchasing what he believed was a piece of high-quality machinery. "Quality equipment lasts almost indefinitely," he says. "Such a short life for this type of equipment is exceptional."