Nontrivial Exercises

My Decent Tablet PC Customer Service Experience with Toshiba

Three months into my tablet PC experience, just as I have become attached to – even dependent upon – my Toshiba M200 tablet, it has happened. The screen on my M200 broke.

After following Tracy Hooten’s terrible experience with Toshiba (see here, here, and here; you can keep reading previous posts for the complete history of her issue) when her new M200’s screen cracked, I was anticipating a horrible time dealing with customer service issues and long delays in getting everything fixed. However, my experience has been much more positive than Tracy’s, though not perfect.

It started last Wednesday night. Everything on the tablet was working fine during the day at work. Then, when I turned it on that evening, the screen images were distorted, had shadows and there were some vertical lines, even when the screen was black. I found out that my company had purchased on-site support for the few M200’s that they bought, so I called up Toshiba the next day. My tablet is now fixed, one week later, though not without some bumps in the road. I’ll chronicle the experience with a time line below:

Thursday 10/6, approx 11:00am – I call Toshiba’s customer support number and explain my issue to the phone technician. She had me try several reboots and checked the BIOS settings, and finally concluded that it was likely the LCD screen. Since I had on-site support, she said that someone from a local authorized service company would call me “soon”. So far, so good, I thought.

Thursday 10/6, approx 3:00 pm – I received a call from a local service technician. He referenced my case and said that Toshiba was overnighting a new LCD screen to him, and he would be able to come out tomorrow to replace it. Since I was taking Friday off anyway, I told him to come by my house. Wow, I was impressed. First, the case made its way through Toshiba’s trouble tracking system to a local company, and I received a call within hours of submitting my case. Second, Toshiba was going to send a new LCD screen overnight so that I could potentially have it repaired the following day. This was going great.

Friday 10/7, 1:30 pm – The technician arrived at my house. He quickly took the screen apart, removed the old LCD and put in the new one. I was ready to bid him thanks and good bye, and get back to my tablet. It had already been about a day and a half since it worked, and I needed to catch up on a couple of things at work. Well, not so fast. Changing out the LCD didn’t work. Now, it was showing all white all the time. The technician tried putting the old LCD back in, but now this one showed all white, too. After double checking the connections and the power inverter, he called up Toshiba service support. They concluded that it was either a bad LCD that they shipped out, or the wiring harness – the cables that connect the motherboard to the LCD and digitizer. Apparently, on convertible tablets the cables can sometimes work lose or become damaged from the constant turning of the screen. So, Toshiba agreed to overnight both a new LCD and a new wiring harness. 

Monday 10/10, 11:53 am – I called the technician to see if the new LCD and wiring harness had come in, since I hadn’t heard anything yet. They hadn’t, so I had to wait another day.

Tuesday 10/11, 9:40 am – The technician called and said the new LCD and wiring harness had arrived. I told him to come straight over to my home, and I left my office to meet him there.

Tuesday 10/11, 10:00 am – The technician arrived at my house and changed out the LCD again. Nothing new, still showing all white. Since the wiring harness connects to the motherboard, he wanted to take the computer back to his “lab” where he could take it apart in a low-dust and electrostatically safe area. So, I parted with the M200 and proceeded to wait some more. I was no longer impressed with my whole experience. Even though Toshiba had seemed to respond quickly both initially and to shipping out the second LCD and wiring harness (except for “overnighting” something out Friday and it arriving Tuesday), I was now six days without my tablet.

Tuesday 10/11, approx 3:00 pm – The technician called to report more bad news. The wiring harness didn’t work. It now must be the motherboard itself. At least Toshiba agreed to overnight a new motherboard. I would have to wait one more day.

Wednesday 10/12, approx 3:00 pm – The technician called again to report some good news – everything was working now with the new motherboard. Wow, I was excited that I was going to get my tablet back, finally!

Wednesday 10/12, 3:50 pm – The technician came to my office to drop off the tablet. Hooray!

Wednesday 10/12, 4:00 pm – I booted up and starting checking things out. Everything on the hard drive was fine (I had everything backed up anyway – I have become quite compulsive about backups after having a hard drive crash about 18 months ago), but there were a couple of other things that were not right. First, the technician had attached the screen incorrectly to the swivel mechanism. Rather than swiveling around clockwise to go into slate mode, it swiveled around counterclockwise. Second, the screen wasn’t attached very well – it was very wobbly and loose. Third, the technician had left finger smudges on the inside of the clear plastic screen cover. Argh! I called the technician back and he was apologetic. He said he could come back and pick up the tablet Thursday, but probably couldn’t get it back to me until Friday.  What could I do? I said OK.

Thursday 10/13, 1:00 pm – The technician arrived at my office and picked up the tablet.

Friday 10/14, 10:00 am – The technician arrived back at my office with the M200, replete with new LCD, new wiring harness and new motherboard. Other than the tablet smelling like smoke, it looked pretty good. The smudges were gone (except one small one on the lower right side of the screen), the screen was working and firmly attached, and it rotated correctly. Ah, finally. However, I found one other issue. It seems that when I rotate the screen from laptop mode to slate mode, the computer does not recognize that the screen has rotated and change the screen orientation. As I played around with it more, I saw that the little button just under the screen on the laptop part of the M200 wasn’t getting pushed down enough to trigger the change in orientation. When I push it down with my finger, it feels a lot more firm than it used to. I wonder if it didn’t get put back exactly right when everything was all opened up.

Despite my week-long inconvenience, and the screen not changing orientation automatically when I rotate it around to slate mode, I would rate my repair service experience good overall. Toshiba certainly responded quickly by overnighting the replacement parts each time since I had on-site repair service that my company had purchased. I also think that the technician who worked on my tablet communicated professionally and did “OK” work, though it could have been better.

My experience has most certainly been better than Tracy’s. Hopefully, Toshiba is able to produce more positive customer support experiences and fix their process and issues that have caused other people so much frustration.