Toshiba Direct Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc. Sold faulty laptop, refused refund, refused to speak to me, Internet

Just an information on dealing with companies over the phone. never let your anger get the best of you or you wont get any positive results at all. operators are human too, they get pissed. if you dont get treated right on the spot you'd get mad either, right?!

most companies, well toshiba, i know for a fact that they do call back but if youre a major a*s dont expect that call, man! who would want to talk to a total tool, right?! If you werent able to get the assistance that you like try it in a more nicer approach. 

about your hard drive, toshiba has 1 year warranty for all toshiba branded items. they can and shouldve replaced your hard drive if it crashed, but they are not to be held liable of your mishaps. if thats how you want it to be played would you want them to throw back their loses at you as well?! 

Just saying, companies donot need to treat you like a baby. Suck it up!

Don't think for a minute anyone is buying your sudden revelation that you were backing your laptop to a Toshiba external.   It just too obviously made up.

Lastly, if you think backing your laptop up to an external meets professional standards of care for client documents, you're still way off base.    What kind of goofy firm would allow this?    Frankly, this whole thing sounds made up.

I've seen better, but I'll give you a D for effort. With an attitude like you display here, it's no wonder Toshiba would no longer take your calls. Your arrogance and inflexibility are astounding. As I said before, sorry for your problems but now that I see your true colors, not quite as sorry as before.

Sir, you made no mention of having had a backup drive, let alone that said drive also failed 2 days before the laptop did. This omission made it reasonable to figure you did not back up your laptop data, and that you placed work data in jeopardy through neglect of this.

There was no excuse to respond as you did with name calling. It makes you look like an unreasonable hot head and leads others to figure that's why Toshiba reps don't want any part of you.

Now, why did you omit the external drive failure from your original post, given it's extreme, even critical, relevance to your situation? Are you just adding that in now to cover up the lack of data backup and make Toshiba look even worse. Not saying you are, but you left yourself open to this assumption.

Let's go forward with the external drive failure 2 days before a given. Forgetting your personal data, since nobody else's business or client depended on them, how could you let 2 days go by without immediately replacing that drive and doing a full work data backup at least? You must have had at least 1 day to get to a Staples or whatever to get another drive in an emergency. It's like leaving a house without insurance for 1 or 2 days. It could burn down in that time. Who's to blame if that happens.

Most people these days have at least a 2nd backup of sorts for the most sensitive data. We have 2 flash drives in addition to 1 external drive, plus data copied on 2 other PCs. Yeah, if our external and all computers go together, we'll still lose a lot. We're not fully covered, but my work data at least is covered as much as reasonably possible. And we have a lot of photos and video copied to social network sites. And after seeing your post, we'll probably get a second external drive.

Now, maybe you also need to think of why 2 such items would fry within days of each other? Is there a possible problem with the electrical where they were plugged into? Was the external drive connected to the laptop for its power? If so, maybe the laptop had an electrical issue that fried both the drive and itself.

Don't stop at regular customer service. Call Toshiba's corporate executive offices and insist a staffer there take on the case.

It is highly unlikely that you were backing up your data to an external (Toshiba or any other brand) hard drive. You didn't mention it in your initial report and certainly would have during your attack on Toshiba. You threw that in after the comments about your failure to backup your data.

Failing to maintain a backup of your data was a major blunder of basic computer operation.

Toshiba's only obligation to you is to replace the hard drive under warranty. The only rip off here is your failure to protect your client's data.

Thanks Ken, you sound like a real judgmental p***k.  You don't sound like the kind of person who would ever even be in a position to be an employer but that aside, you're not wrong.  I probably should have mentioned that the Toshiba brand external drive I used to back up my data also irreparably failed two days before my laptop did.  I fully understand the Toshiba return policy but repairing or replacing one shoddily made Toshiba device that fails with another isn't an acceptable alternative to me.  My beef isn't the technicalities outlined in their policies, it's that two pieces of their hardware failed on me and nobody gave enough of a s**t to even take my call.  When I called Toshiba Direct to give them my money I got through in 30 seconds and was treated amazingly well.  When I called with a problem they kept me on hold for hours and was literally told a supervisor was "unwilling to take [my] call".  At least make an effort to hide the fact that you don't give a s**t about your customers. 

"I've lost family pictures of deceased relatives, volumes of work material, and dozens of legal documents.  I lost a major client for my firm, was reprimanded by a judge for coming to court the day after the crash without the required documents, and nearly lost my job."

Disk drives from any manufacturer can crash at any time.  Thin platters spinning at 7200 rpm are quite susceptible to damage, particularly in  laptops that tend to move around more than desktops.    It is up to everyone to ensure that they have backup copies of all important documents and photographs.  Who doesn't know this?

I really hope the above passage does not mean that you are an attorney.   If you lack such a basic grasp of document storage standards, I feel sorry for your clients.  If you really are an attorney, you probably should have lost your job.

If your backup plan for data and documents is to depend on Toshiba or some other company to extract it from a dead disk drive, you needed this wakeup call.  

Toshibas warranty says that they will fix or replace your computer, not refund your money.  What part of that do you find confusing?

it is YOUR FAULT that you did not back up your data...NOT theirs.

If you're doing business for your firm without maintaining reqular backups, you're a very careless employee. If I were your employer, you would now be UNemployed.  Usually, you should make backups daily, especially for business purposes and vital data should also be stored off premises.

Did Toshiba fix your computer? I doubt their warranty covers a refund and they are in NO way obligated to make you whole for your lack of data backup.

Did you allow them the opportunity to fix it?  Did you just demand your money back?  Have you started doing regular backups?