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Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sharp Electronics, Sony, and Toshiba have been sued by a group of computer owners who claim the companies' advertising deceptively overstates their hard drives' true capacity, according to Reuters.

The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed earlier this week in Los Angeles Superior Court by Angelinos Dan Lanchau, Adam Selkowitz, Tim Swan, and John Zahabian.

Decimal Points

"According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system," Reuters reports.

"The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 gigabytes would actually have only 18.6 gigabytes of readable capacity, the lawsuit said. The plaintiffs said this difference in convention is deceptive and leaves buyers with less storage than they thought they were getting when they purchased their computers."

The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, "disgorgement of ill-gotten profits," and attorney fees, the article adds.

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