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.'"
Quality hardware and software is not that expensive. It only costs a little more. For example ECC memory. Why are so many paying for glitz while scrimping on the important stuff.
I encourage others to switch to eComStation on good hardware. Join other eComStation users
http://www.os2voice.org/
http://www.os2world.com/
eComStation, much more stable and secure than windows yet much easier than Linux.
I finally found good hardware at a place that would pre-load my preferred OS, eComStation.
The vendor's web site is real basic because he puts his time and money in have the best product.
For Christmas I bought a system from CSS.
http://www.curtissystemssoftware.com/preloads.htm
It came preloaded with a OpenOffice.org. Has quality hardware (instead of the Dell's lowest bidder components). Even had ECC memory
Even with out anti-virus software it is immune to all the windows virus/trojan/worms/.. crap. I also don't have to worry about the vendor shutting down my OS or apps remotely in the future.