A reader writes in to report that when he bought a new laptop direct from Toshiba in November, he triggered a blue screen of death as he was uninstalling the always-useful bloatware that came pre-loaded. He called a Service Rep, got the usual “reinstall everything” run-around, and then finally got escalated to a level-two tech, which is when things got ridiculous.

the techs put me through to a level-two tech who, and I quote verbatim (because I asked him to repeat the line to me multiple times) accused me of “breaking my computer by attempting to uninstall bloatware.” I said, “do you even know what bloatware is,” and he said “yes, and it may be your fault that your computer is broken because you tried to uninstall it.” I asked if I was supposed to check with Toshiba every time I added or removed a program from my computer. He had no answer for that.

This wasn’t the only bad experience the reader reported. Toshiba also refused to price-match the laptop to their Black Friday discount, because the discount was “we’ll pay your sales tax” and, according to the CSR who promised the original price-matching, it isn’t technically a price reduction.

Oh, and after the bloatware incident, Toshiba sent our reader a new hard drive—to the wrong address. And they “forgot” to schedule a tech to come install it.

Toshiba does not sound like a good direct-sales destination.

(Thanks to W.!)

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