Boy, Michael Dell's obsession with copying Apple just keeps getting scarier. We probably don't need to recite the laundry list of copycat moves Dell has made in the past couple of years, but we'll mention a few just to get the newbies up to speed: the WebPC (comes in different colors, low-cost, targets "hip" consumers who want to surf the 'net just like the iMac). The Inspiron 3x00 laptop (comes in different colors, a consumer portable like the iBook). The focus on wireless networking options, right after AirPort was making waves. And then there's the truly frightening things, like Dell issuing an earnings warning right after Apple did. It's just not healthy.

It's time to add another item to the list of stalkeresque behavior; Dell's copying Apple's bugs, too. You know about the infamous iBook hard disk corruption bug, right? Basically, an inordinate number of iBook owners are finding their systems unbootable, particularly after trying to wake them from sleep mode. You can read all about this worrisome syndrome at MacInTouch; Apple's keeping pretty quiet about it, from what we can tell. If any of you out there are iBook users, turn off the "Preserve Memory Contents" feature in the Energy Saver control panel if you ever turned it on; this seems to be triggering the problem. (For what it's worth, the AtAT iBook has never had that feature enabled, and has never encountered the problem.)

Well, Dell wasn't about to be outdone; faithful viewer Marc Blaydoe was kind enough to point out a ZDNet article discussing recent memory bugs with Dell's laptops, too. Apparently some Dell Latitude and Inspiron notebooks are crashing hard when they're woken up from slee-- er, suspend mode. But rather than copy Apple's bug completely, they put their own spin on things: the problem involves bad RAM instead of a corruption when saving RAM contents to disk. And in another departure from Apple's footsteps, Dell has actually acknowledged the problem publicly. They've posted a diagnostic tool to determine whether or not a laptop is affected, and they're even fixing afflicted systems. Hmmm, maybe it's time for Steve to start copying Mike Dell a little. But just a little.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to say that ZDNet's graphic for this article, which shows two giant ants attacking a pair of Dell laptops (complete with funky target designs to reinforce the idea of "attack"), are really, really funny. (Actually, the ants appear to be facing the wrong way. Whatever.) All we can say is, if the Dell systems really did come with a ten-inch-long ant in the box, we bet sales wouldn't be quite so brisk.