SOUNDING OFF: Ripped off? Stunned by good value? Write, blog or text your experience to us

A reader from Dublin ordered a new battery for his Dell laptop computer earlier this summer using the company's website. He waited and waited but nothing ever came. He first placed the order on June 18th and was given a delivery date of July 2nd.

However, on July 25th, he received an automatically generated e-mail from the company which said that it realised "just how long you have been waiting for your order - and we are endeavouring to deliver it to you as soon as possible". It continued that "there has been a further delay at our suppliers which means you now have a new revised estimated delivery date". The new date was set for August 11th, nearly two months after he had first placed the order.

August 11th came and went and no news from the company. Eventually, at the beginning of this month, he gave up waiting and contacted us. We got in touch with the company last week. In a statement the company said there was a delay with the delivery of a replacement battery "which, unfortunately, was not communicated to the customer".

The statement accepted that Dell had not met "the standards which we would normally seek to achieve in supporting our customers and we regret this".

It apologised to our reader and agreed to replace the battery free of charge.

Brauned off

Michael Kenna priced a four-pack of Braun Oral-B electric toothbrush refill brushes in Tesco at €24.49 recently. He says it seems to be a standard price as his local pharmacy charges much the same amount.

"Checking on Amazon I found I could purchase a pack of 4 brushes for £7.90 . The downside was that postage was an additional £5.08 ," he writes. He ordered his new brushes on November 6th and received them four days later. "Even with the exchange rate, I reckon I've saved more than €8 on the deal. The irony of it all? The brushes were made in Ireland, at Braun's Carlow factory."

Pills for pennies

We recently mentioned the low cost of paracetemol in the UK. Muireann Ní Mhóráin sent us a mail saying she had come across 16 tablets selling for 12p in Asda in Northern Ireland, while the shop is selling ibuprofen - the component part of Nurofen - for 24p.

Sour about flour

In reply to the claim that Irish shoppers heading abroad are killing Irish jobs, Philip Carroll writes: "Over the past number of years the Irish people have and still are being ripped off. There is no price control. It is a well-known fact that if the price of something (let's say oil) comes down on the international market, it is always very slow to come down here. Why? What excuse will the oil companies give this time? Over the last few weeks the price of flour has being coming down on the international market and in turn the cost of bread in UK supermarkets went down, yet here the price of bread went up."