Davos Newbies

Luke Harding: “Cycling home to our west Berlin flat, I recently noticed a shiny new undertaker’s, offering some attractive deals on wooden coffins. It had replaced a children’s clothes store – a neat metaphor for the demographic transformation of Europe’s biggest state.”

I was going to write a nice note about the telephone support I received from Toshiba this morning, about my messed-up laptop. Richard on the US support line was helpful and technically well informed.

But something is truly rotten in the state of Toshiba, or at least Toshiba Europe. I bought my Portege M200 in London about 20 months ago. It’s still under warranty. The problem is that moving from London to Berkeley means an awful lot of stuff is in boxes that haven’t been touched yet. In one of those boxes, I’m pretty sure, is my Toshiba recovery disk. But wouldn’t it be easier to get a replacement recovery disk from Toshiba?

Trouble is Toshiba USA can’t provide a recovery disk for my European-spec laptop. That has to come from Toshiba Europe. I’m helpfully provided the phone number in Britain. That’s where the problems begin.

Toshiba Europe can send a recovery disk. But they can only send it to a European address. Oh, and they don’t accept a credit card. So they suggest we find someone in the UK who can send them a check (or cheque), they will then send the disk to that person, who can then send it to me.

That’s a great way to treat a customer who has a product that is still under warranty, isn’t it? When the day comes to replace this laptop (which might well be sooner rather than later), I’m sure not going to have good thoughts about Toshiba. Extraordinary.

Update It gets better (read: worse). Just received this from Toshiba Global Support Centre: “Please find attached the Replacement Product Recovery Media form. The replacement cost for the recovery media is £35.25 (£30 plus VAT). In order to receive the requested software, please carefully read and complete the form, and mail it together with a cheque for the replacement cost to the address indicated on the form. The delivery of the replacement media may take up to 4 weeks after the form and payment have been received by Toshiba.”

Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be able to download this from a Toshiba website for free?

Something has gone desperately wrong with my Toshiba laptop. It fails to restart and even trying to boot from a Windows XP CD doesn’t work (I get a mysterious “halacpi.dll could not be loaded. Error code is 7″, which even Google doesn’t seem to elucidate). Toshiba recommends I use the recovery disk, which will instigate a full system recovery.

That, of course, also means the loss of all my data. Fortunately, Gmail and Google Calendar allow me to function from any computer (so much of my life is browser-based these days). And when I get my computer up and running again, there’s the handy little Mirra box in my office that has quietly been backing up all my stuff all the time. Phew.

I’m hugely enjoying David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations. Both Tyler Cowen and Paul Krugman lauded the book as an insightful account of the development of endogenous growth theory, sometimes known as the economics of increasing returns. But even 70 pages into the work, I do fear for the state of book editing.

When Warsh introduces David Ricardo, he mentions that his family moved to England in the middle of the “nineteenth century”, before Ricardo was born in 1772. Later a key Ricardo quote has “these these” muddling up the sense. When John Stuart Mill appears, he is referred to as John “Start” Mill. All authors make these kinds of mistakes, but even a poor editor should catch them. Books were once edited to a higher standard than newspapers and magazines. Now, I’m not sure. I don’t think Norton, the publisher of Warsh’s book, is the only culprit.

There’s another editing niggle I have with the book. Throughout the discussion of Adam Smith, Warsh refers largely to England. Given Smith’s firm Scottishness, I think he should have used Britain in almost every case (curiously, the one time Britain gets a look in is when Warsh discusses Napoleon’s planned invasion of England being foiled by the British Navy). I don’t think Warsh or his editors made a conscious choice here. Too many Americans seem to think England is Britain. It isn’t. Great Britain has three nations: England, Scotland and Wales (and it’s the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland).