Satellite l755. Just about ok. Review on Toshiba Satellite L755 M1CU

I have been using the l755 since December 2011. It performed well initially but as time started to pass, more and more problems started to creep up. Finally I got tired of it and sold it this past week.

Why I selected the l755

Honestly, I had no intention of buying a Toshiba laptop. I was looking for a good laptop from Lenovo, Dell or Hp since they were readily available in India back then and servicing them and claiming warranty in case anything goes wrong would be easy. Toshiba laptops were yet to catch on and so the brand was not even considered. All of that changed when I was visiting a mall in Dubai with my dad and uncle. The store was having a clearance sale to make space for the new stocks that would be arriving shortly for the annual Dubai shopping festival which was to be held in January. One mind blowing offer they had going on was that on the purchase of 2 Toshiba satellite l755 laptops, we would get a third absolutely free! It was unbelievable. I was mighty impressed by the laptop specs. i7 laptops were extremely rare in India back then and one would set you back almost 70K INR.Even today, the cheapest i7 will cost you 45000.Three i7 laptops for the price of 90K INR? could life get any better? All of the research and thought I had put in over the past few months regarding which laptop to buy was tossed out the window. We all felt that this was an offer we couldn't refuse and purchased three identical laptops. I took one of them and my uncle gave one each to my two cousins. We split the bill three ways, so the laptop cost me 30, 000 rupees.

Specifications

Windows 7 64bit Home premium.

Intel Core i7 2670QM 2.20Ghz quad core processor.

4GB RAM.

1GB GT525m dedicated graphics card by Nvidia.

650GB hard disk

First impressions

All of us were happy with the purchase we had made. All of my friends were green with envy that I had obtained an i7 at 30K. The laptop worked fine and me and my brother were impressed that it was able to run most games without too much fuss. The laptop ran smooth and we didn't have any problems on any of the three laptops. But there were a few things I was not impressed with.My laptop had one tiny pixel near the top right corner that was permanently red.It was invisible as long as the background wasn't dark. On contacting the dealer they said I would not be given a replacement as Toshiba only allows replacements in case you have a minimum of 5 dead pixels. The design Toshiba had opted for the case didn't look nice.It was a sort of dark grey with tiny white spots that looked ok at close range but from a distance formed a sort of diamond pattern. The fan within the laptop also made some amount of noise when it was running. Another thing we didn't like was that Toshiba had installed the OS with a lot of extra bloatware. These were absolutely useless as most of them had to be purchased separately online. These programs did nothing but slow the laptop on startup. We were luckily able to uninstall most of them but some of them could not be removed. Also the laptop would heat up quite a lot when graphic intensive games were played for more than 20 to 30 minutes at a time. Apart from these minor niggles, all 3 laptops worked fine. Battery back up was also good. 5 hours normal use without wifi. With the wifi on, you could expect a maximum of around 3.5 hours. The same for watching videos with headphones and the wifi turned off.

First signs of trouble begin to appear

After 9 or 10 months had passed, the laptop owned by my cousin sister started showing troubles of keyboard damage. Some of the keys would not work and sometimes the num pad keys would stop working altogether. We were quite shocked since she was a moderate user and her laptop was never used for gaming and 99% of her use was limited to watching movies and browsing the web. It was still under warranty so we took it to the authorized service center in Thrissur. Unsurprisingly, warranty could only be claimed in the country of purchase. So we were forced to shell out Rs 1800 for the keyboard replacement.

All hell breaks loose

We didn't give much thought to it thinking that electrical components do tend to malfunction and this was a one off. We were wrong. About 5 months after this incident, the keyboard on my cousin brother's laptop started to malfunction. But it wasn't as bad as his sister's laptop since only a few keys were not functioning. He didn't get it replaced and instead bought a USB keyboard.Shortly afterwards the wifi and Bluetooth on his laptop started acting strangely. Bluetooth stopped working completely after a few days. Wifi worked fine but the wifi LED light was permanently off. Also on turning on the laptop, you would have to turn on and turn off the wifi a few times to get it functioning properly again. He finally got rid of this problem by re installing windows from the recovery discs he had made. Unfortunately, this problem recurred again after a few weeks and then the same thing happened to my laptop. On contacting the Toshiba customer service through email, I got a reply saying that this was a common problem and that they are working on finding a solution for it. They gave me no reason as to what the problem was or tell me if I had to take it to a service center. After searching through various tech threads and blogs, I found out that this problem was caused by a system driver malfunction. The driver installed on our laptops was actually made for an older model which had an external wifi switch that would turn on/off the wifi module. This switch did not exist on our laptops. After trying a few different ways to rectify this debacle, we finally succeeded in finding a short term solution. Completely turn off the laptop and disconnect the battery and power supply. Then insert it after some time and voila! problem solved. This solution would work a few weeks but the problem kept reappearing. But with time we grew used to this hassle.

By now almost 2 years had passed.Now my cousin brother's laptop started developing a display problem. Very slight but visible horizontal white lines started showing and they become more visible as you lowered the brightness. Fortunately they didn't increase in intensity and weren't noticeable unless someone specifically pointed it out to you.By now he had grown tired of his laptop and it various problems so he sold it online for about 25K back in June 2014.

In hindsight I should have done the same.By august 2014, the battery was showing signs of aging. It wouldn't last more than an hour without wifi and with the wifi on, the maximum time I could use it was about 35 minutes. By September, the battery was pretty much dead and unless plugged in, would completely die in about 10 minutes. Another annoying problem that started to occur was that my laptop would restart unexpectedly once in a while.This problem kept getting worse until a few weeks after this problem initially started. my laptop was restarting every 2 or 3 hours.Then things took a turn for the worse. The laptop started shutting down as soon as the AC adapter was plugged in. It would work fine on the battery alone but as soon as the adapter was plugged in it would turn off. The only way I could plug it in and use the laptop was by starting windows in safe mode.I thought all of this was due to the battery becoming unusable and so decided to replace it. So now started the process of finding a replacement.When my dad checked with the dealer in dubai, he was shocked on hearing the price. Approximately 8, 000 rupees for the OEM replacement battery. A Chinese replacement was available for 2500 with 2 months warranty.On contacting the dealer in kerala I was able to purchase the OEM battery for 4500 rupees.Annoyingly there was only a 45 days warranty period. After plugging in the new battery I found that the AC adapter restarting problem was still present and then I knew I was in deep trouble.I took the laptop to the Toshiba service center the next day and had to leave it there.3 days later they called me and informed me that there was something wrong with the motherboard and that they were not equipped to handle the problem. The laptop was then sent via courier to their main center located in Kochi. After another 2 weeks I received the laptop and a total bill of Rs 5000. No satisfactory explanation was given regarding what had gone wrong and if anything had been replaced. The bill just said laptop serviced-Rs4500 and inspection charge-Rs500. They gave me the number of their service center at kochi if I needed further information regarding the laptop but that number is either permanently busy or it does not exist. I didn't pursue the matter further.The laptop worked fine since the repair was done. Then on one of my trips to kochi I decided to go to the main service center just for the sake of it. Upon inquiring with one of the senior service engineers he told me that this shutting down when adapter is plugged in problem was caused by a faulty component on the motherboard. Heat and dust would damage it in 2 or 3 years based on the climate and usage patters and he also mentioned that they get 5 or 6 laptops every month due to this same fault.Unfortunately, the only solution was to replace the faulty part with a similar one and hope the new one didn't get damaged. I was no longer interested in holding on to the laptop incase I had to spend Rs 5k again in a couple of years time. So I sold it on olx for 22K. Unless you get an offer like me, stay away from toshiba. The replacement and service charges are too high. Sorry for the rather long and whiny review.