Compaq hit with floppy drive lawsuit

With Toshiba's blood still fresh on their hands, a group of Texas solicitors have hit Compaq with a similar lawsuit over faulty floppy disk drives. The lawyers, from Orgain, Bell & Tucker, filed the suit in the same federal court in Beaumont, Texas. They allege that Compaq has for years been selling PCs with defective floppy drives that can corrupt user data, according to the Wall Street Journal. But Compaq said it would not surrender as easily as Toshiba. Last week, the Japanese heavyweight agreed to fork out more than $1 billion to counter alleged problems with floppy drive controllers in its notebooks. Toshiba denied any liability, but the lawyers now say that the same problem also lives in micro-controller chips for floppy drives other vendors have been using for over a decade. Compaq yesterday labelled the class action suit "vague", claiming the law firm was trying to cash in on its recent win. "The complaint filed against Compaq appears to be a copycat suit filed in an attempt to exploit the recent settlement by Toshiba," said Compaq. "The issues raised in that suit dealt with micro-code problems specific to Toshiba laptop computers. We're confident Compaq products have no problems," the company said. ®