Dell moves to fix Vostro fiasco

Replacement keyboards on the way to affected customers

8 May 2008 22:13 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Dell has moved to fix the fiasco over installing a wrong keyboard into its latest Vostro laptops that caused a stir of bad publicity on the Internet last week.

In a post on the company's blog, Bill Bivin, Laptop Liaison, has said that the company is working to fix the problem.

Quoting the original Flickr image and citing the power of sites like Pocket-lint to make the company sit up and listen, Bivin admits the company made a mistake.

"There is no way to say it ... we made a mistake and want to apologize to affected customers. I want to point out that this issue only affects some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It should not be an issue for customers in any other region."

Dell blame the issue on choosing "to use a larger left-Shift key than the one that commonly ships on industry-standard keyboard layouts".

The computer company say that "The new layout moves the backslash key to the far right of the second row from the bottom, which pushes the rest of the letter keys on that row to their traditional positions. While this location differs from some layouts, the larger left Shift key is beginning to appear on more systems there".

Dell says that they will be contacting all affected customers. They will receive an updated keyboard and two options:

Either to replace the keyboard and update the BIOS themselves or have a field technician replace the keyboard onsite.