El Reg Unit of Bad Smells?
Days old Cat Pee?
Ok, Mines the one with one of those air freshners you dangle from the mirror in your car. Although I'm not sure if they actually smell less repulsive?
Buyers of Dell's Latitude 6430u Ultrabook have noticed a very unpleasant bug: a strong odour resembling cat urine. News of the 6430u's fragrant emissions appear in this thread in Dell's support forums. Complaints started in June 2013 when a user named “three west” wrote “So a few weeks ago I got a new Lattitude 6430u for work …
Must be all the bundled crapware that Dell thrusts down your throat when you buy a new laptop. Toolbars, ad-supported games, worthless music players, photo apps, annoying launchers that take up most of your desktop, McAfee AV... Finally it's all achieved critical mass and begun to actually stink in the real world.
Seriously though, I remember about 7 years ago we had a batch of (Hitachi?) laptop hard drives that had a plastic layer that would smell very much like bad B.O. after they'd heated and cooled a few times.
We've been using the 6430u since they were released back in Feb and have over 100 of them now. I receive them all and deploy them and have never noticed the cat p**s smell.
Perhaps it was a dodgy batch? Our new ones feel slightly different to the original ones. They have a slight powdery feel on the case now so I'm assuming their manufacturing process has changed slightly.
Apart from the fact the screen is a bit pants, they are solid little notebooks. <Sniffs one> - they actually smell quite pleasant although I'd imagine after a few years of use, the textured rubbery case will get worn down and be covered in horrible shiny patches. They scuff very easy too.