A few additional comments from someone who has lived in both Tornado Alley and Hurricane Central (aka the Gulf Coast):

Even an EF0 tornado (which is viewed as incredibly weak) can do substantial damage to small buildings, mobile homes, and vehicles.

Part of that is due to the tornado having multiple vortices, where you can have a weak vortex and inside is a much stronger vortex. See Xenia, Ohio, 1974 for an explanation.

The United States just happens to have the exact sort of geographic and weather patterns that are very conducive for tornadoes to spawn. Again, see April, 1974 for an extreme (but surprisingly common) example of a tornado outbreak.

All tornadoes have the potential of being dangerous. Even if it's in open farmland, or a forest area, a tornado still can cause damage, and even death. (See Iowa, June 2008 and the death of 4 at a Boy Scout Camp)

While tornadoes can occur at any hour of the day, there are two general periods of time when tornadoes are more likely. For what is called Tornado Alley (Texas through the Dakotas) the most likely time is in the afternoon hours into the early evening. But for what might be called Dixie Alley (which is the southestern US) the most likely times are from 10pm to 5am in the mornings.

I'm not a meteorologist, but I did for a few years study meteorology with an intent to go into the career field.

I work with Dell hardware every day as part of my job. [The company I work for is about 99% Dell-centric when it comes to desktops and laptops.] As such, I have had to deal with a lot of Dell issues in the past, such as the GX270 motherboard problem (we haven't quite gotten to swapping out all of the system boards, but it's been a fair number), and the previous recalls of batteries from Dell. In the previous recall, it was the C600/C610 notebooks that were affected, not their current generation of systems. But still, there is a question of quality at times. The only good is that we can have a replacement on hand in most cases within 24 hours, if the device failed in some way. With the battery recall, we're being told we have to follow the same instructions if we have 1 battery or 100 batteries to send back, the corporate Dell help line is not allowed to process them specifically for the company.

At least in our case we don't have the sort of issues that the average customer is going through. We have a specific phone number to call for tech support, and I'll at least say this much: the techs I work with over the phone won't ask if we've done X to fix the issue. They know if I'm calling up, I've already done X, Y, and Z and it's dead, Jim.