Sunday, March 07, 2004

Toshiba Trade-In Credit Disappears A reader writes: In January of this year I purchased a new Toshiba Tecra S1 and docking station to use in my growing IT consulting business. I purchased a Toshiba rather than an IBM ThinkPad as Toshiba advertised an attractive TradeUps program whereby they would give you a cash amount for your old notebook in trade once you purchased a new Toshiba notebook and sent back your old notebook to them. To get your money, you would also need to send in proof of purchase of a new Toshiba notebook. I had no problem with this. As I said, I purchased the new notebook and dutifully packed-up and sent in my old Toshiba notebook. The notebook was working perfectly and booted-up fine when it left me. Toshiba indicated my unit was worth about $375.00 in trade-in value. I had been waiting for about a month with no word, so I decided to call the Toshiba TradeUps program to get a status report. After two weeks of telling me the notebook was in the inspection queue, today I was told that my notebook had arrived DOA, would not boot-up and so the unit was trashed. No emails were sent to me informing me of this problem, no phone calls. The supervisor I eventually demanded to speak to only quoted company policy that DOA notebooks received are worthless and are trashed. What happened to the notification I should have received informing me of this problem? She could not answer that question. The notebook was fine when it left here. So, what happened? All I know is I am out the $375 trade-in allowance for my old notebook. I still don't have an answer and I don't accept the explanation that it arrived DOA. 2:12:30 PM    comment []