See here. Dell is being sued in New York for consumer fraud. Charges include a variety of ways in which Dell allegedly promised one thing in advertisements and delivered another. Seems to be mostly about service plans and financing. The most hilarious bait and switch of course is this notion that you call up and they build your machine from scratch, custom-made, just the way you like it. Trust me, we’ve had meetings there. They build stuff in advance just like everybody else. Their telemarketers are trained to steer you to whatever they’ve got too much of out in the warehouse. “Well, I know you called up for that super deal on a laptop, and we can make you one of those if you want it [erm, not really] but let me tell you about this deal we have on a model with more memory. Are you going to be making movies? Storing photographs? Music? Browsing the web? Oh, well, you’re really going to need more memory than that machine in the advertisement.”