"John" <fred@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:12j7bog96h3lddc@news.supernews.com
> My granddaughter bought a M55 laptop about 4 months ago, and has
> experienced the "blue screen of death" on a regular basis since.  She
> finally made me aware of the problem, and after updating video
> drivers and bios, we called Toshiba.
>
> They said no warranty left (only three months) ... take to a local
> repair facility.
>
> After the evaluation, the bill would be $300.
>
> Ok, think about this .... bad from the beginning, three month
> warrenty, and now $300 to fix this POS after only 5 months or so.
>
> Boy have we learned a lesson.  We just went out and bought here a real
> laptop and she is happy, but I am pissed.  We are  going to use it for
> target practice I guess.
>
> To all you lurkers out there in the evaluation mode .... check the
> warranty (they bought it a Office Depot), but better yet ... look at
> a Dell or an HP.
> I have an M45, and I hate mine too, only starts up correctly only
> about 75% of the time. I have done a total restore about 4 times in
> the last year.
> Buyer beware ...

I realize that you might be upset John... but don't you think you are a
bit hard? For starters I have two Toshiba 2595XDVD made in '99 and they
are sill working just fine. That is 7 years old which is excellent for
laptop lifespan. Although some argue that those older Toshiba laptops 
were of better quality.

Second of all, the only 90 day warrantee on laptops I know are 
refurbished laptops. The vast majority of them had nothing wrong with 
them in the first place. While others really had a problem with them. 
The hope is to get all of them in like new condition and by law they 
can't sell them as brand new. I'm betting that is what this Toshiba was.

I'm guessing here, but it is very possible someone bought this laptop as 
new and discovered this intermittent problem. They did the right thing 
and probably returned it. Thus it got sent back to the factory. Since it 
is intermittent, the factory may have not found anything wrong with it 
and resold it as refurbished.

Now somehow your granddaughter ended up with it. Now here is the tough 
part. Whenever a Windows machine crashes, 99.999% wants to blame 
Windows. The truth is, not everything is Windows fault. As sometimes it 
is something else. And sometimes it is hardware. Although she should 
have asked someone to help her, but she didn't. As I don't care who's 
fault it is (software or hardware or whatever), if it doesn't work out 
of the box, take it back! This isn't Toshiba's fault, now is it?

And what about your M45? Is it still under warrantee? It comes with a 
standard one year warrantee. So when did it break? After a year later? 
Or did you buy one of those refurbished ones too with only a 90 day 
warrantee? Like this one:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1953301&Sku=S278-5002&Tab=7

Btw, I generally will buy refurbished first anyway. And I just bought a 
refurbished Gateway MX6124 from TigerDirect almost 3 months ago and it 
came with a 90 warrantee (only $499 too after a TigerDirect rebate and 
it was a steal). Yes a few more days and the warrantee will be over. And 
it is working 100% perfectly so far. But if there was a single problem, 
it would have gone back. Trust me! And perhaps you (and/or your 
granddaughter) should have done the same.

-- 
Bill