It's black to basics for off-colour Dell

You can have any colour you want, so long as it is black.

This is what Dell, the world's No 2 computer manufacturer, has been telling customers, after the launch of a range of colourful laptops was stymied by too much dust in the paint.

"Right now, Tuxedo Black is the only colour that is consistently meeting our quality standards," Alex Gruzen, a senior vice-president in Dell's consumer products group, wrote on the accident-prone company's blog. "That's one reason why some customers are getting their orders before others."

Mr Gruzen wrote that there was "no problem painting hundreds at a time. But as we increased the volume, otherwise manageable factors like dust contamination caused our successful yields to decrease".

The problem is the latest in a string of disasters at Dell, which has been forced in the past 18 months to fess-up to exploding laptop batteries, infuriating customer service, and a culture of fiddling the figures to meet financial targets.

And to cap it all, its arch-rival Hewlett-Packard has soared past it in sales to take Dell's crown as the world's largest PC maker.

The colourful XPS M1330 and Inspiron laptops - available in vibrant blues, greens, yellows and pinks, were meant to spearhead a new sales push to regain lost market share, but the problems are causing delays slap in the middle of the back-to-school selling season. The "pearl white" option has already been dropped.

The difficulties have been compounded by a shortage of parts used in screen manufacture.