meltdown at Dell

News from PC Magazine: Dell To Announce Massive Laptop Battery Recall: "Although Dell officials did not comment on how the battery risk was discovered, two recent high-profile incidents involved Dell batteries spectacularly exploding. In the first, a Japanese businessman watched his Dell notebook go up in smoke in late May. More recently, a worker in Illinois watched his own Dell laptop melt. "

Hey, I guess we're really lucky--we just watched ours, in a Dell Inspiron laptop, not work any more after a couple of months. The laptop has been on life support, plugged into the wall socket, ever since.

Then, after having keyboard problems for ages with this Inspiron laptop, we got notice in the mail that Dell had lost a class-action lawsuit and would submit to replacing our keyboard, now that they were being forced. One thing I figure I can count on now, with Dell, is that they will take care of their own interests first, until they are forced by overwhelming evidence to take care of the customers' interests--they're using the Ford Motor Company business model for customer relations. I personally have voted with my feet. Our two Dells languish until they die, and we are now buying IBM for anything new in the business. We had had it with Dell a long time ago.