Toshiba Portegé...the new face of fail

[drquuxum.livejournal.com]

Oh, Toshiba Portegé, you have given me a new mental image for "FAIL".

It's a Tablet PC, so rebuilding it is already ten times harder than it needs to be. But, yes! Toshiba must make it even harder, in case your system gets the almightly pwn (I think I've already ranted about unsafe swapping of USB drives while your antivirus is disabled....)

Toshiba has made it so it can only boot to a select subset of CD/DVD drives -- like the ones you don't have unless you shelled out for a $500 one at the time of purchasing this hunkacrap.

All is not lost, though. You can also boot to the SD reader...if you've made a bootable SD card before-hand using the Toshiba SD Boot Utility, which only runs with that same machine. But, hey, making a bootable SD card just to recover from a system crash is something everyone does, right?

It took me two days before I gave up on it and sent it back. It came back with its standard install image...without patches. Luckily I got to it before $LUSER did (who would, no doubt, hook it up to a wide-open network where it would instantly pwned).

Comments

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Like the whole restoration CD business-model scam. Now they (the manufacturers) don't even provide the CD, you have to burn it before hand. And when you want to reinstall you have a wipe the whole disk, even if you have partitions.

(I guess I'm safe, as the first thing I do is actually wipe the disk and install Linux, even though I was forced to pay for that crap)

[syberghost.livejournal.com]

For anybody who doubts you about "instantly pwned"; it takes about 20 seconds here, and we're INSIDE a corporate firewall. That's 20 seconds just from rogue machines that aren't being managed by the LAN folks.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

We keep a Targus slim USB 2 dvd drive around for just this kind of crap. Its not on toshiba's list, but it does work all the same.

[brotherflounder]

Well! Thank you for killing my lingering desire to own one of these.

[brotherflounder]

Oh, and I'm surprised that Toshiba's pulling this crap now, too. That sounds like something HP would do.

[jarad.livejournal.com]

I have a luser with one of these hunks of crap as well.

I found one way to run the restore, is to put the hard-disk in another machine, and when booting the restore DVD, it's autoexec.bat contains a program that basically quits the autoexec sequence should it be a non-toshiba machine. Just type in the ghost command by hand, and it'll restore the hard-disk anyway.