Dark Drakan
Well-known Member
Its been a while since I experienced this myself but happened again recently and amazed that companies still get away with this sort of thing. This thread isnt just aimed at Toshiba either this is just the incident that brought it back up, had this same thing with PC world when I was younger and less knowledgeable too and they have been in trouble for not honouring the sales of goods act & they have even been in trouble for other shady things also.
Back in May my wife & I suggested we get a basic laptop for her sons birthday for him to do his homework on (as he was starting high school) and to watch Youtube on and browse the Internet here and there (nothing fancy just something basic). His Grandma decided she would pay for it if I looked over the specs to check it was ok and would be capable of doing what he would want it to do. We knew he wasnt going to be maxing out The Witcher III or anything like that on it but for word processing and browsing the Internet & other basic purposes it seemed ok and price wasnt too bad overall (for a laptop).
We purchased the laptop and it was a Toshiba Satellite, like I said it was nothing more than a very basic entry level laptop/notebook but seemed enough to do what he needed it for. Looked fairly nice & slim too and turned on fine and everything seems to work as it should (besides it having Windows 8 which I had to tweak). However as soon as he actually went to do anything on it the trouble started, I plugged a USB mouse into it as I cant stand sensor pads and noticed straight away that it had become very sluggish and things were struggling to load etc and even mouse cursor was slow to move. So I played around with some startup programs and cleaned out the Anti-Virus etc that came with it and other unneeded preloaded programs and optimised everything I could. Restarted and it seemed to take forever to restart and nearly 10 mins past before it booted back up but overall it ran a little better when it did manage to get to Windows. However as soon as you started to attempt to do anything on it like open Internet browser or word processing program it slowed to a crawl again.
So my wife decided to call Toshiba Support to see if there was any faults with this model or any known issues. She was simply told to do all the things I had already tried as well as reverting it to factory settings (even though it was actaully now better optimised than factory settings). She was also told by Toshiba support to simply not plug anything into the USB ports, so no USB mouse, No USB stick to transfer documents (homework) and no connecting printer, the USB ports were useless...
Since then it has even took over 5 mins to open the Internet Browser and some pages took minutes to load (I have 200MB) connection (pic of test I just did on my computer). So it should not have been struggling to simply load a page even on the WiFi...
So as an experiment and to further test if it was capable of actually doing anything I tried to see if (the currently free) C&C Red Alert II would play on it. A game that is over 15 years old and something which my 17 year old Pentium III could run just fine and both my wifes 7 year old laptop and my own 6 year old laptop could run with no issues at all. After loading up and the menu running fine I tried to enter a game and it barely managed a single frame a second before it completely froze and I had to end task via Task Manager. The specs for the game are hardly demanding for a new laptop and these days a phone could likely run something that required those specs:
Back in May my wife & I suggested we get a basic laptop for her sons birthday for him to do his homework on (as he was starting high school) and to watch Youtube on and browse the Internet here and there (nothing fancy just something basic). His Grandma decided she would pay for it if I looked over the specs to check it was ok and would be capable of doing what he would want it to do. We knew he wasnt going to be maxing out The Witcher III or anything like that on it but for word processing and browsing the Internet & other basic purposes it seemed ok and price wasnt too bad overall (for a laptop).
We purchased the laptop and it was a Toshiba Satellite, like I said it was nothing more than a very basic entry level laptop/notebook but seemed enough to do what he needed it for. Looked fairly nice & slim too and turned on fine and everything seems to work as it should (besides it having Windows 8 which I had to tweak). However as soon as he actually went to do anything on it the trouble started, I plugged a USB mouse into it as I cant stand sensor pads and noticed straight away that it had become very sluggish and things were struggling to load etc and even mouse cursor was slow to move. So I played around with some startup programs and cleaned out the Anti-Virus etc that came with it and other unneeded preloaded programs and optimised everything I could. Restarted and it seemed to take forever to restart and nearly 10 mins past before it booted back up but overall it ran a little better when it did manage to get to Windows. However as soon as you started to attempt to do anything on it like open Internet browser or word processing program it slowed to a crawl again.
So my wife decided to call Toshiba Support to see if there was any faults with this model or any known issues. She was simply told to do all the things I had already tried as well as reverting it to factory settings (even though it was actaully now better optimised than factory settings). She was also told by Toshiba support to simply not plug anything into the USB ports, so no USB mouse, No USB stick to transfer documents (homework) and no connecting printer, the USB ports were useless...
Since then it has even took over 5 mins to open the Internet Browser and some pages took minutes to load (I have 200MB) connection (pic of test I just did on my computer). So it should not have been struggling to simply load a page even on the WiFi...
Red Alert 2 Specs
Windows 95, 98, NT 6.0, 2000, or Millennium
Pentium II 266 or better
64 MB of RAM
2 MB of Video RAM
16 bit color
Direct Sound Compliant Sound Card
200 MB of additional hard drive space
3D Hardware acceleration (optional)
The Laptop Specs
AMD E1 E1-6010 dual core processor.
1.35GHz processor speed.
4GB RAM.
Intel HD GFX
500GB SATA hard drive.
Annoyingly I even saw an advert on TV recently advertising the same model laptop and a free upgrade to Windows 10 with £100 off. The laptop barely runs Windows 8 that it comes with and the software that is already loaded onto it and they are trying to tempt people to upgrade to Windows 10...
So to get to the overall point of my thread...
How can companies get away with selling products that arent fit for purpose and what are these laptops good for exactly?
Pentium II 266 or better
64 MB of RAM
2 MB of Video RAM
16 bit color
Direct Sound Compliant Sound Card
200 MB of additional hard drive space
3D Hardware acceleration (optional)
The Laptop Specs
AMD E1 E1-6010 dual core processor.
1.35GHz processor speed.
4GB RAM.
Intel HD GFX
500GB SATA hard drive.
Annoyingly I even saw an advert on TV recently advertising the same model laptop and a free upgrade to Windows 10 with £100 off. The laptop barely runs Windows 8 that it comes with and the software that is already loaded onto it and they are trying to tempt people to upgrade to Windows 10...
So to get to the overall point of my thread...
How can companies get away with selling products that arent fit for purpose and what are these laptops good for exactly?