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Dell Laptop Burns House Down
Nuclear Elephant writes "The Consumerist is running a story about a house burned down by a Dell laptop. 'My 130-year-old former farm house was engulfed in flames, with thick dark smoke pouring out of the windows and roof... Hours later, after investigation the fire marshal investigator took me aside asked me if I had a laptop computer. Yes — I told him I had a Dell Inspiron 1200.' It was determined that the laptop, battery, or cord malfunctioned after its owner left for work, leaving the fire to spread through the entire house. All attempts to contact Dell have failed. 'I have tried to call Dell to at least notify them of my problems, but each time I have called I get transferred into an endless loop of "Joe" or "Alan" all speaking a delectable version of English I presume emanates from Bangalore. I have been outright hung up on each time I get someone who speaks a reasonable version of English, or sounds like they might be in charge of something. Promises of call backs have gone, of course, unreturned.'"
I had some problems with getting Dell to complete my order (some recovery CDs were missing). I posted about it on Slashdot a few months back and got a reply from a US Dell employeee telling me to drop him a line and he'd help fix it (I'm in the UK) and try to his word after a couple of phone calls everything was sorted out and dandy.
So before everyone starts ragging on Dell, remember there are at least a couple of good apples there.
I like muppets.
I imagine this has happened many times before. It can just be hard to narrow down the cause to a single source.
5 years ago, 6 out of 100 of our new 17" Dell monitors went up in flames, over the first 3 months. This was fortunately an office building with very high ceilings, so there was little risk. I've long imagined just how bad that could have been in a private home, with a low ceiling, and wall nearby. That experience alone stopped me from ever buying anything from Dell.
All the articles on Notebook fires are very old news. Dell's been having fire problem with their entire product range for about the past 10 years. Passing it off as Sony's fault ignores Dell's long history of similar ocurances with all of their machines.
Since it happened to me, I've been wonder when I'd hear about a class action against Dell, but it's never been forthcoming. I guess residential building fires can cover up the evidence pretty well. Sooner or later, it's going to have to come out.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
His computer isn't on the list of computers with affected batteries.
I wonder if this is a hoax. The Portland News site does not say anything about the cause of the fire. It does not even name the owner of the house. All we have is some guy named Dan (no last name) writing a letter to a blog claiming a Dell laptop burned down his house. Has anyone bothered to check the facts?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I purchased a Dell XPS 1210 in Australia in November last year, with 3 Years (CompleteCover Guard) Theft insurance. I was typing on the laptop while sitting down at a local restaurant at a fancy part of town, when two big guys came running past the table and grabbed the laptop from behind.
I chased the thieves two blocks before they were able to give me the slip. The whole thing was on security camera (in daylight), and the police informed me that they had a clear picture of the entire incident.
When I reported the incident to Dell, they replied to me the next day via e-mail and said that my claim was rejected because there was no sign of force to the premises. I was stunned, and so went to read the policy. Yes, it said that "Theft of attempted theft not accompanied by forcible and violent entry" was excluded. I then noticed that the policy on the Dell website was somewhat different to the policy provided to me via hardcopy, but they both had a similar clause.
Finally, I decided that if they wanted to get technical, I'd do the same. After carefully reading *both* policies, I noticed that they both had wording similar to "CompleteCover Service is only available with the purchase of a Dell Latitude or Inspiron portable computer, or Dimension or Optiplex or Precision desktop computer, or Axim PDA (The "Product") but is not necessary that you purchase CompleteCover Service to buy a Product from us."
So what did I purchase? Obviously they had no document explaining exclusions for my XPS, since it appears they didn't have a valid policy!
At one point, I was verbally informed that XPS was a Latitude. When I captured many screenshots of the website as evidence against this, Dell denied that this was ever stated.
There were a few other arguable points I could have made, but in the end Dell just wouldn't listen. I only ever spoke to call centers in Asia where the accent was so thick it was hard to understand. I had one e-mail admit there might be a problem with the policy and they will try to fix it in the near future, and many apologies, but every e-mail always quoted "There was no theft of attempted theft not accompanied by forcible and violent entry". E-mails were sometimes hard to read due to invalid sentence structure.
I have been advised not to try and fight this. I am quite broke (my wife is out of work, I am on a small income and only just paid the stolen laptop off), and feel powerless to do anything. I feel the best I can do is encourage people not to purchase anything from Dell. It sure seems like I'm not the only one with a bad experience.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!