Annoyed with Toshiba

On Thanksgiving morning I went to Toshiba's website to order some new RAM for Shawn's laptop. Her computer, a light weight Portege model, came with a mere 512MB of RAM and Windows XP. She wanted to upgrade to Windows 7, but that required a memory upgrade. Just as well as her PC was getting a tad sluggish.

The Toshiba website worked pretty well. I looked up her model number and up came the available accessories. I checked the memory link and was told that a 2GB card was available. Great! I made the purchase and we got it in the mail last Thursday.

Shawn backed up her laptop at work on Friday. Sunday morning, I set to replacing the old memory with the new. It was an easy operation. Rather than lifting the keyboard out I just had to unscrew a hatch on the bottom, snap the old one out, and insert the new one. The operation took less than 2 minutes. When I went to boot, an alarm sounded and the laptop would not run.

To make a long story short, her PC isn't equipped to handle anything more than a 1 GB card. So, why was Toshiba even offering a 2GB card associated with her model number? Sure, I could have looked it up in the specs before I made the order, but I figured this was Toshiba's website and they wouldn't steer me wrong, right? Wrong.

But that's only the beginning of my annoyance. It continued when I made the call to their customer service this morning. Yes, they provided me with a return authorization number and the address and so forth. Yes, the person was kind enough on the phone. However, when I asked if Toshiba, upon receipt of the wrong product they sold me, could then just ship me the correct product and then credit my account the difference I was told that they were not set up to operate this way. In other words, Toshiba's computer software couldn't handle that. I would have to wait for the account to be credited and then go online and re-order the correct product or I could have a second charge applied to my account and get the correct product ordered right away and then they would credit the account when the wrong product is returned. That's where I went off the rails. That's crappy customer service. In fact, it's not customer service. After their website steering me wrong that's a poor way of handling this.

Now that I have the correct information, I think that I'll re-order the part from someone else. Even if I was willing to order the RAM to have it rushed out and just wait for the credit, I wouldn't do that from Toshiba. They aren't willing to go the extra step and I'm not willing to give them my money.