Dell's Monumental Snafu Renders UK Vostro Laptops Useless

London (United Kingdom) - When Jake Gordon from UK bought his new Dell Vostro 1310, he had no idea that his $1289 purchase will actually rebound in a spectacular way.

Jake discovered that his keyboard comes with a letter Z positioned bellow S and D keys, instead of below A and S keys. It seems that Dell subsistuted Z key with a backslash key, sending all continuing keys to the right. When a snafu of this proportions appears in this generation, what do you do ? Upload pictures of it to a popular website, of course. Gordon uploaded the pictures to Flickr, and site is bombarded with readers right now.

What else to do but to phone Dell, and ask for a new laptop, and this is where things got interesting. It seems that Dell shipped almost Vosto 1310 and 1510 notebooks that were launched in the UK the day before yestersday.

After stating that all of Vostro 1310 notebooks are screwed up, Dell UK came up with a following statement :

"A limited number of Vostro 1310 and 1510 in Europe have been sent out with the wrong keyboard layout. We are working diligently to offer a solution to impacted customers and correct the error. Once a solution is in place, we will be contacting impacted customers directly to both apologise and instruct them on next steps. We are still investigating this issue and will come back with more detailed information as soon as possible. We have made a mistake here and will be acting as quickly as possible to find a satisfactory solution for our customers.
Regardless of Dell’s official stance, we can take a wild guess that the ODM manufacturer of Dell notebooks is now sweating and will have one hell of a refurb notebook stock, manufacturing fixed laptops for free. "

Quanta Computer’s CEO won’t have peaceful dreams this weekend. And all this came in the same week when Quanta announced that their year-on-year production grew by 18% thanks to increased orders from Dell, HP and Apple. Talk about raining on someone’s parade.