Last November I purchased a Toshiba Satellite P25 from TigerDirect.com. I ordered it by phone having checked that the TV tuner could handle PAL TV signals since I would shortly be moving to the UK. I checked this 3 times making it quite clear that I would be in the UK and a tuner which only handled NTSC would be useless and the salesman on the phone assured me that it could handle both.
I gave him my credit card number, the laptop was delivered in the US and everything was fine. I discovered the identical machine was available from Cosco for several hundred dollars less a couple of weeks later but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
In January, I arrived in the UK, hooked it up to the TV signal and got nothing. Absolute snow. I researched the tech specs carefully and found in the small print that the tuner was NTSC only.
I emailed Tiger Direct pointing out that this was one of the conditions I purchased it and so the product was unfit for the purpose it was sold for. The first reply stated that it was more than a month ago so they weren't going to do anything. When I pointed out that their salesman was the one who claimed it could pick up PAL and that I was hardly going to discover that until I got to the UK, they replied (via a non-return email address this time) that this was not what it was advertized to do.
The moral - beware of lying salesmen and the companies that employ them.
The P25 itself contains an aptly named Matshita UJ-811 DVD drive. This drive is one of the few with non-flash firmware which means, to the end user, that it is physically impossible to be made region-free. For this reason, I've recommended to several people who were impressed by the P25 to look elsewhere.
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