Around December last year I bought a new Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop. Overall, I've been happy with the machine, though it is a bit on the heavy side, and I really can't complain much about it.

A few weeks ago I read the news about the huge Sony battery recall by Dell for a lot of its laptops, and I immediately went to the site to check it out. As fate would have it, my battery is indeed one of the faulty ones and needed to be replaced, so I filled the request form right away and within a day got a confirmation email saying that my request had been received.

And that was it.

That ways one and a half months ago, and I still hadn't heard anything else about it. The confirmation email said I was supposed to receive another email when the replacement battery shipped, which I haven't. So I decided to take a few minutes today and called Dell support to ask about what the issue was.

Apparently, they're out of stock, and until more arrive they won't be replacing my battery. And no, they don't know when that might happen, and no, there's no way to speed up the process. You know, for something that was supposed to be a fire risk, this doesn't impress me. And yes, you can (and I do a lot of the time) remove the old battery, but what good is a laptop computer without a stupid battery?

Something tells me though that while they say they're out of stock, that's not holding shipments of new laptops. Needless to say, I'm not happy about it, and I'm quite disappointed as such a poor job on Dell's part in handling this whole mess. At the very least, they should be proactively telling people what's going on and explaining why we haven't received our replacement batteries yet.