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 of them said on the company’s online customer forums that the odour seems to be coming from the keyboard or palm rest.
The Texas-based company originally advised buyers through its forums to try cleaning their 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,” a customer using the handle “three west” wrote on a Dell forum in June. “It is truly awful!”
On Wednesday, another customer, writing under the handle “passflips”, said he felt terrible for repeatedly scolding his cat Jerry, because he thought the elderly feline kept spraying the computer. The poster also said he wasted money on veterinarian bills in an attempt to determine whether his cat had a medical problem.
Dell said on Thursday that its investigation revealed the strange scent was related to a manufacturing process, which the company has since fixed.