Consumers are claiming that Palm products have fried their PCs. It's alleged that HotSync, the feature used to synchronise data between the Palm and the PC, is responsible for damaging the PCs motherboard. Apparently, the feature can also disable the serial port on certain computers.

The suit was filed on Tuesday by Pinnacle Law Group on the grounds that Palm and 3Com failed to warn users about the defect present in some models of Palm V and Palm Vx.

While Pinnacle first heard of the problems occurring with PCs from Dell, they have since received complaints about similar incidents with systems from Gateway, Compaq, Toshiba and Apple.

Spokeswoman for Palm, Marlene Somsak said: "Palm is not aware of any HotSync operation that will cause damage to computer motherboards."