Verbal spray for Dell over laptops that smell like cat pee
A NOXIOUS feline odour has some Dell customers hissing.
People who own Dell Latitude 6430u laptops are complaining that their pricey new computers are emitting a smell similar to cat urine.
Some have said on the company’s online customer forums that the odour seems to be coming from the keyboard or palm rest.
The Round Rock, Texas, company originally advised buyers through its forums to try cleaning the keyboards with a soft cloth or compressed air, but the smell persisted.
‘‘The machine is great, but it smells as if it was assembled near a tomcat’s litter box,’’ wrote a customer using the name ‘‘three west’’ on a Dell forum in June. ‘‘It is truly awful!’’
On Thursday, another customer, writing under the name ‘‘passflips’’, said he felt terrible for repeatedly scolding his cat, Jerry, because he thought the elderly animal kept spraying the computer.
Passflips said he wasted money on veterinarian bills in a bid to determine whether his cat had a medical problem.
Dell said yesterday that its inquiries revealed the strange scent was related to a manufacturing process, which the company has since fixed. If your Dell laptop isn’t ‘‘purrfect’’, Dell recommends that owners contact the company’s technical support team to have its palmrest assembly replaced.
Company spokesman David Frink said the odour was not related to ‘‘biological contamination’’ and did not present a health hazard. He added that newly assembled laptops now in stores were not affected.
The laptops in question are ultrabooks designed for business use. The base model starts at US$900 (NZ$1089) on Dell’s website, but Dell charges close to US$1300 for higherend versions that include Windows 8 and Intel Core i5 processors.
While laptop users may find the smell of cat urine offensive, ‘‘cat’s pee’’ is a term sometimes used by wine lovers to describe a wine’s aroma. And while the smell coming from the Dell computers is apparently unintentional, several groups of engineers are working on ‘‘Smello-Vision’’ – television to engage viewers’ olfactory senses.
In addition, a range of recent smartphone add-ons generate scents, too, including the Scentee, a Japanese smartphone attachment designed to plug into a cellphone’s earphone jack and dispense scented vapours through dedicated cartridges.