[TriLUG] Customer service stinks

[Mike M]

My brand new Toshiba A35-S159 will ping in and out but it won't do
UDP or TCP.  I sniffed with ethereal and saw indications of fragmented
packets.  It's got a Realtek (realcrap) 8139 embedded on the mobo so I'm
not suprised there's problems.

THe unit would crap out on large file transfers on NFS, and never
complete transactions with the DNS.  Same behavior under Debian
unstable, Knoppix, and XtraPain.  I even wiped down the disk to 
factory fresh.  I worked with Earthlink to connect the laptop
directly to the cable modem. It was never able to complete the
DHCP request for an IP address.

I was able to use the modem to dial in to Earthlink however.

THis unit was working fine up until last week.

Anybody seen this sort of problem with a NIC?  Could this problem in any
way have been caused by user error?

Salon.com had an article linked from slashdot yesterday describing
customer service modus operendi.  It was describing Toshiba to the
tee with the mantra of "we don't support that".  Any problem related to 
networking is instantly discounted as operator error and it's not supported.

I took the unit in to Digitz on Hillsborough in Raleigh.  I hope they
call with good news.
-- 
Mike

Two hundred years ago, we note mischievously, the average American or 
European had a standard of living not very much superior to that of the
average man in India or China. -- dailyreckoning.com