Dell Employees Knew Its Computers Would Fail
Bad capacitors ruined things for a lot of people.
Dell, still one of the largest sellers of computers in the world, knowingly made and sold to customers machines there were known to be faulty, according to the New York Times.
Between 2003 to 2005, Dell sold millions of OptiPlex machines to major buyers such as Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, Mayo Clinic and various education institutions. The math department at the University of Texas reported to Dell that its machines were failing, and Dell told the school that the machines were overtaxed by all the difficult math calculations they were running. In actuality, the machines were built with bad capacitors that popped and leaked chemicals.
These bad capacitors also affected machines HP and Apple, but the spotlight is on Dell right now as its employees went out of their way to conceal the problem. One internal Dell email stated, "We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had ‘issues’ per our discussion this morning."
Other sales people were told Dell salespeople were told, "Don’t bring this to customer's attention proactively" and "Emphasize uncertainty."
Dell was aware of the problem, as it hired a contractor to investigate. The contractor found that the problem was 10 times worse than Dell had anticipated. Dell itself found that the bad capacitors were expected to cause problems up to 97 percent of the time over the three-year period.
To make matters worse, Dell was replacing the faulty computer parts with other faulty parts, resulting in just a refreshed cycle of almost inevitable failure. Dell chose not to issue a recall, but extended the warranty on the affected machines, leaving it up to the customer to contact Dell in the case of failure.
With customers unaware of the hardware problems, some would lose valuable data from the PC malfunction, which was the basis of several lawsuit claims. At the time, Dell denied that that the capacitor issue caused any data loss. Ironically, the law firm that was representing Dell in the lawsuit, Alston & Bird, also had its own OptiPlex machines fail.
Read more at the New York Times.
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"Ironically, the law firm that was representing Dell in the lawsuit, Alston & Bird, also had its own OptiPlex machines fail" Blerghh..
"Ironically, the law firm that was representing Dell in the lawsuit, Alston & Bird, also had its own OptiPlex machines fail" Blerghh..
Indeed, hilarious!
What models and dates are these? Just in the US? I would imagine they use the same caps in all markets.
i knew there was a reason why i tell people that Dell are bollocks.
This is pretty damn bad, but in all experience with Dell, they're pretty good. (I don't buy them, I put mine together) But working in a college, we have a mixture of Lenovo, Dell and Stone, the dells are the oldest and most functional.
Customer service is total **** though.
Optiplex GX280 - based on RIMMs, and if I am right - GX270 - mostly P3 slimline cases... All of them (GX280) I've seen - failed by now. Dell replaced the mobos for free back in the day.
ahh the good old Optiplex GX270's. we had these at work and I think every single one went back for repair. a typical repair consisted of half the capacitors being replaced, meaning the other half didnt last much longer...
I rescued a couple of broken ones and took them home, got the old soldering iron out and had a GX270 as my main PC for a few years.
In my opinion though Dell handled the situation really really badly, they should have just held their hands up and replaced/repaired all affected PCs, rather than waiting for failures.
What models and dates are these? Just in the US? I would imagine they use the same caps in all markets.
as I said above, the optiplex 270s were affected (and i think some 280s). and i live in the UK
The NHS has stacks and stacks of GX270 and GX280s, there is one in our doctors mess which I think is a 2.8 or 3ghz P4 hasnt been switched off in 5 years and still going despite all the vents and heatsinks being jammed with crud - it makes a noise like a vacuum cleaner...
Boy that lowers my perception of dell
This is why I used to say Dell's automagically broke after their warranty.
Also, the popped caps issue has been true for a long time. I have suspicions it hasn't been completely solved. It's scandalous.
@ mi1ez nope not just the US.
SX270's too. We had about 20 of them at work, and every single one of them failed at least once.
It't only about faulty caps. The general quality of components in Dell PCs is shocking.
Half of the dells i've seen have cut-off PCI-E and AGP slots. WHY????
If you have a chance compare the thickness of a dell and say asus motherboards. You can probably make 2 dell boards aout of same materials used in one asus.
It's unbelievable that so many of you are so unaware of what caused all those failures of computers after 2001. Let me inform you. Some Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturers stole the formula for capacitors from a reputable Japanese manufacturer but what they stole lacked a key chemical ingredient that stablized the capacitors. So the millions of capacitors that they stole ended up expelling excess amounts of gases over time, expanding, leaking and losing their electric charge retaining capacity causing the motherboards and/or power supplies that were made with defective capacitors to fail over time and their computers to continually reboot in loops or fail to boot. Everyone worth his salt at all the major computer manufacturers knew that that was the cause of most of the computer failures and that their technical support people were not allowed to tell their customers the truth. It wasn't just Dell that allegedly did that. I'm amazed most people don't know the truth yet. Well, if you read my comment, now you know. Of course, this is what I was told by many big wigs at several large companies. I know nothing by first hand and everything I said is probably wrong and false and the whole defective capacitor scandal affecting all manufacturers probably never happened and I'm dreaming it all up. LOL.
Of course, I meant they somehow miraculously arrived at the chemical formula for capacitors that lacked a key chemical ingredient, and not that they "stole" anything, and that they therefore manufactured and not "stole" millions of capacitors based on a faulty chemical formula that caused their capacitors to burst, leak and/or explode causing the computers they were in to sometimes act outside their normal parameters, ie. reboot or not start or crash. Of course, this idea is just a dream or a fantasy and millions of computers never crashed, rebooted endlessly or failed to start because of this imaginary problem. Got it? Good.
I worked at the Tech Support centre in Glasgow for a while a few years back and most of the calls I got were for the Caps Problem and for some reason the Mouse Pads on the Laptops seemed to fail a fair bit also.
DELL would replace a faulty motherboard out of warranty but Im sure they stopped this at the end of 2008.
DELL's are OK systems compared to the other brands but again if you want quality buy the parts and build it yourself.