My review isn’t about this particular Toshiba model, it is about the model I have, the Satellite L30. The L30 is now obsolete; if I put my review in the L30 category, no one would read it and benefit. I just felt that it would give people a useful idea of what Toshiba the company is like with its laptops if I wrote in the section for a more recent model.
Toshiba’s products are always more poorly specified, for the money. When I bought this for Rs.27, 000 in 2007, there were laptops by HP and Lenovo for the same price, that offered a larger and better screen, a better optical drive, a larger hard drive, more RAM, a faster processor and a larger battery - for the same price. I still went and bought the Toshiba Satellite L 30, because I heard that Toshiba offered better quality, even if there wasn’t much in quantity. That hasn’t really proven accurate though.
By the first six months, the lid had warped just a little bit (bent concave); the lid locking device therefore didn’t stay tightly in contact in the holes in the bottom half. If you closed the lid and put the laptop into hibernation and traveled with the laptop, the lid would move a millimeter or so because it was the bent and this movement got the computer started.
Then one day after the one year warranty expired, the optical drive died. Shortly after, the battery began to give me no more than a half-hour’s backup. I had both replaced. Then, unfortunately, the fan began to make a lot of noise too. I took it to the HCL-Toshiba authorized service center in Noida near Delhi, and they said that it would cost Rs.2500 to replace. Like a fool I agreed to this, and they took two months to order a fan and get it ready.
When I went there to pick it up, I found that the screen didn’t really look like my original screen. There was a section of dead pixels(the size of a mustard seed) at the top center of the screen that I never saw before. I questioned them on this, and demanded that the waive my exorbitant service fee for having damaged my screen. They tried to claim that it wasn’t their fault; but I insisted that I be compensated, and they agreed to waive a large part of the service fee.
Now that I am back home and using the laptop, I find that there is two things wrong with it. First, they seem to have installed the fan incorrectly, because the CPU keeps overheating and shutting down. I’ll have to go back for that. And secondly, I have the suspicion that they stole my screen, and replaced it with a defective screen. I feel this way because before I gave it to them, the laptop screen looked fine when viewed direct at eye level. Now, the image is very dark and unviewable when seen held directly at eye level. It only looks acceptable when viewed tilted forward.
I can’t imagine one reason to recommend Toshiba’s products. They are unnecessarily expensive, poorly specified, they have no durability, and their support and service are expensive and of very low quality. And their driver download page, only lists obsolete drivers(and the driver web page doesn’t work a lot of the time).